Rybakova is the only daughter of literary critic Natalia Ivanova, deputy editor of the magazine Znamya, and a granddaughter of the writer Anatoly Rybakov.
[1] Over the years she worked and travelled in a number of places, including Geneva, Munich, the Mekong River region in Thailand, and Changchun, China, where she held a visiting lecturer position at the Northeast Normal University.
[2] Among other fellowships, Rybakova was a writer-in-residence at Bard College (2005) and the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University, Budapest (2016–2017).
[3] She taught at California State University, Long Beach, during the academic year 2006–2007, and then joined the Classics and Humanities faculty of San Diego State University for a decade.
[4] Since then, she has held a visiting fellowship at the New Europe College, Bucharest (2017–2018), and a Fulbright scholarship at the A.I.