Born in Belarus in 1887, Dropkin joined her husband in New York in 1912. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Dropkin’s poems appeared in avant-garde Yiddish literary publications. Her poems are infused with erotic energy, and their themes – sex, love and death – shocked her contemporaries. But they were enamored by Dropkin’s angry and passionate poems, which questioned societal assumptions about love. Dropkin was acclaimed by established Yiddish writers as a leading woman poet. She published one book of poems during her lifetime: In Heysn Vint (1935). After Dropkin’s death, her five children sponsored the publication of a new and expanded edition of her poetry, short stories, and paintings in 1959.