Readers can never rely on a poet to write their own autobiography; in most cases, poets never do. Similarly, poets can never really expect to be given the opportunity to present their lives to readers in the way they would wish.

The long-term project by Linor Goralik, "Private Faces: Biographies of Poets Told by Themselves," is an attempt to give today's poets the freedom to tell their stories on their own terms. The current, first volume of "Private Faces" includes the autobiographies of thirteen poets: Mikhail Aizenberg, Sergey Zavialov, Vladimir Gandelsman, Dmitry Kuzmin, Alexander Barash, Alexey Tsvetkov, Vera Pavlova, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Fedor Svarovsky, Sergey Gandlevsky, Alexander Skidan, Elena Fanailova, and Boris Khersonsky.