2024 Jewish Poetry Conference: Scholars Reading
July 4, 2024: 3:15-4:30 pm ET
Readers:
Talia Bloch’s debut poetry collection is Inheritance. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, North American Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the 2023 National Poetry Series Competition, and her work was selected for Best Small Fictions 2020 and a Pleiades Editor’s Prize for Emerging Poets. Bellevue Literary Review included her work in a film of poetry, music, and dance that has been recognized internationally. Her journalism has appeared in outlets such as The Brooklyn Rail, The Forward, and Tablet.
Ori Fienberg’s poetry is forthcoming this year in Cimarron Review, The Dallas Review, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, and Superstition Review. Ori is the author of the chapbooks Old Habits, New Markets, available from elsewhere press, and Interim Assistant Dean of Having a Rich Inner Life from Ghost City Press. Where Babies Come From is available this fall 2024 from Cornerstone Press. Ori lives with his partner, writer and ceramicist Emily Maloney. More writing can be found at orifienberg.com.
Zach Goldberg is a writer, educator, and arts organizer from Durham, NC. He is the author of the chapbook XV (Nomadic Press/Black Lawrence, 2020) and the full length collection I’d Rather Be Destroyed (Button Poetry, 2024). Zach has received support from the MN Jewish Arts Council and the Metro Regional Arts Council, and he was the winner of the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His work can be found in AGNI, Pleiades, RHINO, and elsewhere. He is a proud co-founder of BuckSlam MN and a volunteer at Boneshaker Books. He lives on occupied Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN.
Tikva Hecht’s poetry can be found in Canadian Literature, CV2, Grain Magazine, Modern Literature, and The Lehrhaus, among other publications. Her first full length collection is forthcoming from Ben Yehuda Press. Tikva is the editorial director at Aleph Beta, and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Riverside, an MA in philosophy from The New School for Social Research, and a BA in Judaic Studies from Yeshiva University, Stern College.
Rachel Kaufman is a poet, historian, and teacher. Her work explores diasporic memory and ritual, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and female religious transmission in colonial New Spain. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember, enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel crypto-Jewish memory alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her current poetry project emerges from the language and myth of the Talmud and reaches towards the possibilities and impossibilities of desire. Her writing has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, and is forthcoming in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies and Colonial Latin America Review. She was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence.
Dan Kraines is a queer poet of Viennese, Ukrainian, and Bolivian heritage. He lives in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side. Dan teaches creative writing and nonfiction at the Fashion Institute of Technology and he has also taught English Language Arts to underserved high school students of New York. His full length collection has been a finalist with Copper Canyon, for the Donald Hall Prize, the Gerald Cable Book Award, and the Amsterdam Open Book Prize. It wrestles with violence of the body and body politic. This book underscores how lyric sequences complicate affirming survival narratives with modes that are politically fraught, unbroken, and lonely. His queer responses to Rilke appeared recently in Rejected Lit Mag and his poems have also been published in The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, and Epiphany, among many other journals. You can get Licht, his first chapbook, from 7 Kitchens Press. Dan completed his MFA at Boston University and an MA in modernist art and politics from NYU. His doctoral dissertation, on Queer Longing, won the Susan B. Anthony Award in gender and sexuality studies from the University of Rochester. You can contact him directly @dan_kraines for his new chapbook, Jaffa.
Miles Liss is a poet and artist who lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia. He has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has lived in England, Israel, India, and the Virgin Islands. Born/raised/NYC by Polish Holocaust survivors. Undergraduate Poetry Prize, University of Pennsylvania 1972. Graduate school Kabbalah 1972 – 1976 Hebrew University, U. of Penn). Apprenticed to Allen Ginsberg, Naropa, 1981. Philip Levine, Yehuda Amichai, NYU 1984. Translated Israeli Rock songs. Millay Colony, Arad Arts Project, Blue Mountain. Beat Museum Poet of Year 2007. Certified teacher Jewish Meditation Chochmat HaLev (1999 -2002) MFA Poetry Warren Wilson. Rabbinical Ordination ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. Rabbi Temple Beth El, Fall River, Massachusetts 7/01/13 – present. Author “The Everything Kabbalah Book,” The Sacred Now (Cultivating Jewish Spiritual Consciousness),” and “Headstone” (finalist Massachusetts Poetry Book of the year).
Hannah Silverstein is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A 2021 Best of the Net finalist, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Swannanoa Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Passengers Journal, Passages North, Barnstorm Journal, Dialogist, Orange Blossom Review, West Trestle Review, Cider Press Review, LEON Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and others. She lives in Vermont and is working on her first full collection.
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio, his home for over forty years with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. “I Study at the Academy of the Smallest Things,” his debut full length collection, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig.
Hila Ratzabi is the author of There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), winner of a gold Nautilus Book Award and finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and others, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. Ratzabi regularly offers poetry readings and workshops and presents panels at AWP and other conferences. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Chicago.