Our Team
Roman Kostovski, Publishing Director & Aquisitions Editor
Roman Kostovski has a B.A. in Russian Language and International Relations from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. in Russian Language and Linguistics from the University of Maryland. He also holds a Lecturer of Czech Certification from Charles University in Prague. He has taught Czech at George Washington University and worked as a Central and Southeastern European Media Analyst at Georgetown University. He translates poetry and prose from Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Slovak into English. His translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Absinthe-New European Writings and Watchword Press and the Poet Lore. His translations include Arnost Lustig’s Fire on Water (Northwestern University Press, 2006), Viktor Dyk’s Czech classic The Ratcatcher (Plamen Press, 2014), Vitězslav Nezval’s Farewell and a Handkerchief-Poems from the Road (Plamen Press, 2020). He founded Plamen Press in 2013, a print-on-demand publishing house for the promotion of literature from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe throughout the English-speaking world. He works and resides in Washington, D.C.
Rachel Miranda, Managing Editor
Rachel Miranda was born in Zurich, Switzerland, immigrated to the US at the age of eight, and has lived largely in Connecticut since then, with intervals in Cleveland, Atlanta, and most recently, Washington, DC. She received an MFA in Writing and Literature at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a BA in European Cultural Studies from Brandeis University. She has written and edited literary and scholarly works ranging from historical retrospectives and memoirs to poetry, novels, and plays. In addition to her freelance clients and her work as managing editor for Plamen Press, she is the development writer for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She was the recipient of a 2015 Vaclav Havel Writing Fellowship to research the life of Czech author Hana Andronikova in Prague, and she authored the proposal that resulted in Plamen Press’s Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her own published works include short stories, poems, and The World at Our Table: A Euro-American Cookbook of Family Favorites. She is currently working on a novel about the immigrant experience.