Inara Cedrins is an American artist, writer and translator who received her B.A. in Writing from Columbia College in Chicago and her M.A. in Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She went to the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1998 to study traditional Chinese ink painting on silk, remaining five years to teach at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University, as well as to the People's Liberation Army, designing courses and using poetry as a vehicle. Two collections of her poetry were published bilingually by the Foreign Literature Press in Beijing. [Read]