Cindy Savett (Board Chair, Head of Philanthropy, & Senior Partners Council Chair) is a poet who has been active using poetry in the mental health community, engaging with psychiatric patients in hospital settings for close to twenty years. Her early studies at the University of Pennsylvania focused on the work of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, enlarging her exploration into internal dialectics. Cindy’s poetry blends a personal awareness of grief with the intricacies of a spiritual life. She is the author of two full-length collections, The Breath and Child in the Road, as well as four chapbooks. Her work can be found in the anthologies, Challenges for the Delusional and Poetry is Bread, The Anthology as well as in numerous journals. Cindy’s poems have been translated into Spanish and performed by the Universidad de Costa Rica, School of Musical Arts, then later put to choreography.

In an earlier career, Cindy served as a Director and VP of Merchandising for a retail chain of women’s clothing stores that operated 347 stores in 29 states. In the non profit community, she has served in roles such as Chair or VP of Development on the boards of Akiba/Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy, CAGE (Central Agency for Jewish Education), CHOP (The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), Federation of Jewish Agencies of Greater Philadelphia, and The Gladwyne Montessori School.

Richard Chess (Board Vice Chair & Book Club Host) is the author of four books of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost (University of Tampa Press 2017), Tekiah (University of Georgia Press 1996; republished by University of Tampa Press 2000); Chair in the Desert (University of Tampa Press 2000); and Third Temple (University of Tampa Press 2006). His poems have been anthologized in Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Bearing Witness: Twenty Years of Image Journal, and elsewhere. His work has also been included in Best American Spiritual Writing 2005. His essays have been included in Stars Shall Bend Their Voices: Poets’ Favorite Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 27 Views of Asheville, Far from the Center of Ambition, and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor to Close Reading, the blog hosted by Slant Books. He was a member of the core arts faculty at the Brandeis Bardin Institute for three years, after which he was on the faculty of the Jewish Arts Institute at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Asheville. He directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years. He also played a leading role in UNC Asheville’s contemplative inquiry initiative. He is a founding board member of Yetzirah and the host of the Yetzirah Book Club.

Richard A. Baron (Board Treasurer) has been on the Board of Yetzirah since March of 2025. Professionally, Richard has served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for the following companies: Zynerba Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing proprietary next-generation synthetic cannabinoid therapeutics formulated for transdermal delivery; Globus Medical Inc., a publicly traded musculoskeletal implant manufacturer; Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotech company that developed an imaging agent for Alzheimers, which was sold to Eli Lilly and Company; eResearch Technology, Inc.; Animas Corporation through its sale to Johnson; Johnson; Genex Services, LLC, a managed care provider for workers compensation and disability; and Marsam Pharmaceuticals Inc., a generic manufacturer of injectable anti-infectives. Richard has also been an independent consultant and a financial consultant for troubled companies with a major accounting firm. He has been a Board Member for various early-stage biotech and technology companies.

Richard has held Board and Treasurer positions at Synagogues in Philadelphia suburbs, Southwest Florida, and a Jewish Camping organization. He actively volunteers with various nature conservation nonprofits and has served as a mentor to students in numerous university and high school academic and entrepreneurial programs. With a B.S. in Economics with a concentration in Accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he is also a former Certified Public Accountant in Pennsylvania.

Yerra Sugarman (Board Secretary & Reading Series Co-Host) is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, February 2022); The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), which won PEN American Center’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Her chapbook From Her Lips Like Steam was published by the Aureole Press at the University of Toledo in December 2019. Other honors she has earned include a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Creative Writers, the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, a Chicago Literary Award, and a “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Award.

She has taught creative writing and literature at the University of Toledo, the University of Houston, Rutgers University, the City College of New York, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and at New York University. She earned an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, she was born in Toronto, and lives in New York City.

Maya Bernstein’s (Board Member) served on faculty at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies from 2015-2025, where she was the co-founder and co-director of the Executive Certificate in Facilitation. She has been the Director of Leadership Education at Yeshivat Maharat since 2017, and designs and facilitates gatherings and leadership training for schools and NGOs. She is the co-author of a Jewish Leadership Curriculum commissioned by the Masa Leadership Center and the Offices of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. From 2005 until 2015, Maya co-founded UpStart Labs, which supports innovation in the Jewish community. Her writing on leadership, facilitation, and innovation has appeared widely, including in the Harvard Business Review and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Her first collection of poetry, There Is No Place Without You, was published in 2022 by Ben Yehuda Press. Her writing has appeared in the Amethyst Review, On the Seawall, the Ekphrastic Review, Lilith Magazine, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Psaltery & Lyre, Tablet Magazine, Vita Poetica, and elsewhere.  She is a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard’s School of Education, a 2012 Covenant Foundation Pomegranate Prize Recipient, and recently received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Maya and her family live in Yonkers, NY.

Jessica Jacobs (Board Member, Founder,  & Executive Director), a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with Genesis (Four Way Books, March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), both named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year; and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and is the co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse, 2020). 

Jessica holds an M.F.A. from Purdue University, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review, and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared widely and she offers readings, talks, and workshops around the country, teaching for programs including the Fine Arts Work Center and the Collegeville Institute.

She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Jehanne Dubrow (Founding Board Member) is the author of ten books of poems, including most recently, Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025), and three books of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019), Taste: A Book of Small Bites (Columbia University Press, 2022), and Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). Her previous poetry collections are Simple Machines, American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post. She has co-edited two anthologies, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume and Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse. A craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, is forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2025. The daughter of two American diplomats, Jehanne was born in Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She lives with her Bedlington Terrier and with her husband who recently retired from a 20-year career in the U.S. Navy. Jehanne serves as a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre. She is also the Series Editor for “Writing From Trauma,” a forthcoming series of new books published by University of New Mexico Press that will offer readers guidance in the craft of representing trauma in print and non-print media. Jehanne is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

David Ebenbach (Emeritus Board Member) is the author of three books of poetry—We Were the People Who Moved, Some Unimaginable Animal, and What’s Left to Us by Evening, as well as six books of fiction and non-fiction. His books have won such awards as the Juniper Prize, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Patricia Bibby Award, among others. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts (writing) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (psychology), David now lives with his family in Washington, DC, where he works at Georgetown University, teaching writing and literature in the Center for Jewish Civilization and promoting student-centered teaching in the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

Jason Schneiderman (Founding Board Member) is the author of four books of poems: Hold Me Tight (Red Hen Press 2020), Primary Source (Red Hen Press 2016), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Prize; Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize, and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books 2004), a Stahlecker Selection. He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2015). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004, and the Jerome J. Shestack Prize in 2016. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Hermitage, and The Fulbright Foundation. You can hear him on the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile, where he and the other editors discuss and vote on submissions for the magazine. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, where he directs the Honors Program. He teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College