Merle Bachman grew up in Albany, New York. She is the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who fled Poland and Russia and came to New York around 1912, where they tried (and failed) at chicken farming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections published by Shearsman, DIORAMA WITH FLEEING FIGURES (2009), and BLOOD PARTY (2015). A poet who delights in writing prose and exploring what seem to be the arbitrary boundaries between these genres, she has had work published in Talisman, Chain, ABACUS, Bridges and Five Fingers Review, among other journals, as well as chapbooks published by Etherdome Press and Finishing Line Press. Syracuse University Press published her book, Recovering 'Yiddishland': Threshold Moments in American Literature, in 2008. A combination of literary criticism, translation, and memoir, it is also her dissertation for the Ph.D. in English, which she earned from the State University of New York at Albany. After living in the Boston area and, for many years, in Northern California, Bachman currently resides in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University and director of its Bachelor of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. Her present projects include researching the work of Scottish-Jewish poet, A. C. Jacobs and translating the Yiddish poetry of the Bialystok émigré, Rosa Nevadovska. For the latter project, she has been named one of the National Yiddish Book Center's Translation Fellows for 2015.