Larisa Alexandrovna - Background

Background

Alexandrovna was born in the Soviet Union to Jewish parents Aleksander Yurovich, a physicist, and Klavdia Borisovna, an accountant. In the Soviet Union, Jews were discriminated against by the state. She has written of her childhood that even as a child, she was able to understand that her family was treated differently:

"What I was given was not what one would call edible or even in a class of food-like products. Again I did not tell my parents, because again I feared something terrible would happen should they react. I was six and I knew this. But my continued weight loss had my mother so concerned that she began selling off the little she had in jewelry in order to bribe my school officials to feed me, with food, the same food, served the same way, as the other children. Most Americans, especially white Americans, would never understand this and have no clue what racism, anti-semitism, and hate are and what damage real hate can do. They faint in public when someone makes a slur but say nothing about US prisons populated with minorities." Mirror Mirror - The Passion of Hypocrites

The family came to the United States after traveling an "entire year maneuvering our way throughout Europe in the common trajectory of Soviet refugees at the time."

Alexandrovna attended Cleveland State University where she majored in English and Creative Writing. It was during this time that she was the poetry editor for the Cleveland Review, also covering local news and culture. In addition, she worked with Russian poet Zoya Folkova to translate her work into English. She also developed a lifelong friendship with her writing mentor, Dr. Alberta Turner. In the mid 1990s, she moved to New York to work at Nasdaq, which she has said was a bad decision.

Alexandrovna likes to read Nabokov, Marquez, Allende, Gogol, Akhmatova, and Tennessee Williams.