Michael Lavery is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, Soviet Translations of Latin American Literature, 1956–1991, examines how translators, editors, and critics mediated between the demands of the official state ideology and their own personal motivations to domesticate Latin American novels for the mass reader in the post-Stalin era. In addition to his ongoing research on the wider patterns of cultural exchange between the Second World and Latin America during the Cold War, Michael has published articles on Polish literature and is currently writing on literary translation within the context of Russian modernist poetry. He is the co-author of two forthcoming textbooks for beginning and intermediate learners of Russian.