The recipient of the third annual Settlement House American Poetry Prize, Lyubomir Nikolov was born in 1954 in Kireevo, Bulgaria. He worked for 10 years as an editor of Literary Forum, a weekly newspaper of the Bulgarian Writers Union. In 1991 Nikolov came to the United States and has lived in Montgomery County, Maryland since 1992. He is author of nine previous poetry collections in Bulgaria, the United States, Argentina and Austria. Idle Lava is the first of his books published in Bulgaria and translated in full into English.