Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin, né e Tsipporah Levine (1887- 1956), was born in Babruysk in what is now Belarus. After attending Russian-language schools and teaching briefly in Warsaw, she went to Kiev in 1907. There she met the Hebrew writer Uri Nissan Gnessin and began to write poems in Russian, one of which Gnessin adapted into Hebrew and published without acknowledging its source. In 1912 she joined her husband in New York, where she continued to write in Russian but also began to publish Yiddish translations of her Russian poetry. Known primarily as a Yiddish poet, she was also a painter and wrote short stories and the novel Di tsvey gefiln (Two Feelings, translated here as Desires) in the 1930s. Her poetry has been both lauded and criticized for its sexual imagery and eroticism.