Uldis Balodis grew up in Arizona, a descendant of the World War II Latvian refugee community in the United States, and is a native speaker of Latvian and English. Languages have fascinated him his entire life and he has studied over thirty of them, including Navajo, Sanskrit and Sámi. He holds a PhD in linguistics and has a particular interest in endangered and lesser-spoken languages. As a translator, he has worked with a variety of literary genres, both fiction and non-fiction. His translation of Rūdolfs Blaumanis’s In the Shadow of Death (Paper + Ink) was published in 2018 as was Trillium (Līvõ Kultūr sidām; Liiviläisten ystävät ry), the first-ever poetry anthology in English and Livonian, an endangered Finnic language native to Latvia, for which he was a contributing translator.