J.  Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translator of The Score of the Game by Tatiana Shcherbina, Say Thank You by Mikhail Aizenberg, When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay, and Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva; the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era.  A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde, published by the Oyster River Press.