Leo Yankevich

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Leo Yankevich (October 30, 1961 – December 11, 2018) was an American poet, editor of The New Formalist, and a translator. He grew up in Farrell, Pennsylvania, and studied History and Polish Studies at Alliance College, earning a BA in 1984. That year he went to Poland on a Kosciuszko Foundation fellowship to study at Kraków's Jagiellonian University. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he moved to Poland and lived in Gliwice. He wrote poems in traditional metre and syllabics, and he translated many poets into English, including Mikhail Lermontov, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stanisław Grochowiak, Czesław Miłosz, Alexander Blok, Leopold Staff, Nikolay Gumilev, and Bolesław Leśmian. His work appeared widely online, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to Poets Against War. He was married and had three sons.