2024 Jewish Poetry Conference: Friday Fellows & Faculty Reading
July 5, 2024: 5:30-7 pm ET, followed by an open in-person Kabbalat Shabbat
Readers:
Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Manual for Living (Pittsburgh, 2016); Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir (Terra Nova Press, 2020); and two books of translation: Book of Minutes (Oberlin College Press, 2019) and Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga (Saturnalia Books, 2021), winner of the Malinda A Markham Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. A 2021 NEA in Translation recipient, Dolin is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and lives in New York City.
Richard Michelson’s books have been listed among the Ten Best of the Year by The NY Times, Publishers Weekly, and The New Yorker; He’s received a National Jewish Book Award, two Gold Medals from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships. His collections include Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant), More Money than God (U Pittsburgh), Battles and Lullabies (U Illinois), and Tap Dancing for the Relatives (U Central Florida). Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Michelson now lives in Western Massachusetts. He served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton and hosts Northampton Poetry Radio.
Yehoshua November is the author of God’s Optimism (a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize), Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and Paterson Poetry Prize), and The Concealment of Endless Light (Orison Books, fall 2024). He teaches at Rutgers University and Touro University.
Elana Bell is the author of Mother Country (BOA Editions 2020), poems about motherhood, fertility, and mental illness. Her debut collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones (LSU Press 2012), received the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to wrestle with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Elana teaches poetry to actors at the Juilliard School and is the founder of the Mother Artist Salon.
Jessica Greenbaum is a writer, teacher and social worker living in Brooklyn. Her first book came out from the Gerald Cable Prize, her second was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and by Library Journal as a best book, and of her third book, Grace Shulman complimented “a brilliant use of metaphor,” and said the poems were “enlivened by keen observation, a fresh mind, and a vivid sense of place that makes me want to be there, with her, in her world.” The Boston Globe named it a best book of year. With Rabbi Hara Person she co-edited the first ever poetry Haggadah, and is a co-editor with poets Jennifer Barber and Fred Marchant of a forthcoming anthology of 21st century poems about trees. Recipient of awards from the NEA and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia, sometimes around Jewish text, and sometimes for communities who have experienced trauma. She has taught classes she designs at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue since 2015, and recently taught poetry writing classes at Barnard College, Vassar College and Brooklyn Poets (where she is on the board). As a social worker she has designed classes for people who have left ultra-Orthodoxy through the organization Footsteps, with 9/11 first responders through NYU Langone hospital, with survivors of childhood brain tumors through the Children’s Brain Tumor Foundation. She is always looking to work with groups where poetry that is accessible to read, provocative to discuss, and fun to use as models, encourages the coherence of both community and self-discovery.