Leo Yankevich

Leo Yankevich (30 October 1961 – 11 December 2018) was an American poet and the editor of The New Formalist.

Early life and education Leo Yankevich grew up and attended high school in Farrell, Pennsylvania, a small steel town in western Pennsylvania. He studied History and Polish Studies at Alliance College, Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, receiving a BA in 1984. Later that year he traveled to Poland on a fellowship from the Kosciuszko Foundation to attend Kraków's Jagiellonian University.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he decided to settle permanently in Poland. Thereafter, he lived in Gliwice, an industrial city in Upper Silesia.

Writing activities Yankevich wrote poems in both traditional metre and in syllabics, and only occasionally in free verse. He was a prolific translator, having rendered into English poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stanisław Grochowiak, Czesław Miłosz, Alexander Blok, Leopold Staff, Nikolay Gumilev, Bolesław Leśmian, and many others. He has a large internet presence with work published in scores of online publications, ranging from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to Poets Against War.

Personal life Yankevich was married and had three sons.

Published works Chapbooks The Language of Birds; Pygmy Forest Press, 1994 Grief's Herbs (translations after the Polish of Stanisław Grochowiak); The Mandrake Press, 1995 The Gnosis of Gnomes; The Mandrake Press, 1995 Epistle from The Dark; The Mandrake Press, 1996 The Golem of Gleiwitz; The Mandrake Press, 1998 "Metaphysics" by Leo Yankevich, 2002

Books The Unfinished Crusade; The Mandrake Press, 2000 The Last Silesian; The Mandrake Press, 2005 Tikkun Olam; Counter-Currents Publishing, 2012 Journey Late at Night: Poems & Translations; Counter-Currents Publishing, 2013 The Hypocrisies of Heaven: Poems New & Old: ; Counter-Currents Publishing, 2016