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.

Valerie Bacharach is a graduate of Carlow University’s MFA program and a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. Her book, Last Glimpse was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. Her poem “Birthday Portrait, Son,” published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

Hannah Butcher-Stell is a Writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College, holding a bachelor’s degree in English from Rollins College. You can find her co-authored fiction in Sky Island Journal, Newfound Journal, and The Headlight Review. Meanwhile, her poetry has won the Academy of American Poets’ Goettling Prize and has also appeared in Sequestrum and No, Dear. She currently works as Poetry Editor of Lumina, Sarah Lawrence\’s literary journal, and as Communications Manager for Daily Giving, a growing Jewish nonprofit.

Joanna Chen‘s full-length poetry translations include Hunting in America (Penguin, winner of The Paper Brigade Award for New Israeli Fiction), Less Like a Dove (Shearsman Books), Frayed Light (Wesleyan University Press, finalist for The Jewish Book Award), and but first I call your name (Shearsman Books). She is also the translator of My Wild Garden (Penguin/Random House) Her work has been published in Asymptote, Waxwing, Mantis and La Piccioletta Barca, among numerous others. Her poetry, essays and interviews have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, Lilith and Narratively, among several others. She teaches literary translation at The Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv.

Rachel Davies is from London, UK, and discovered her love of writing poetry while spending time in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a degree in theology and religious studies from Cambridge University, and originally travelled to Zambia for a year with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) when she was 24. She went on to train at Le Cordon Bleu before running Rachel’s Kitchen Cookery School for over a decade. Most recently, she trained as a coach, and works in leadership development and coaching, alongside other creative projects. Rachel is currently back in London with her husband and their two children, plotting their next adventure. Life, In Shorts is her first published book of poetry.

Called by Avivah Zornberg “a powerfully gifted psalmist,” 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). Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge (Pittsburgh, 2008) won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir and two books of translation from Catalan: Book of Minutes, by Gemma Gorga, and Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga, winner of Saturnalia Books’ Malinda A Markham Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. A 2021 NEA Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize Winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, Dolin lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and teaches poetry workshops. 

Charlotte Friedman is a poet and personal essayist, translator and teacher. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest, lived in New York City for many years and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.  Her poetry has been published in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. most recently, in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Stoneboat and Cagibi, among other journals. She translates, with Carol Rose Little, the Mayan Ch’ol poetry of Juana Peñate Montejo, which has been published in World Literature Today, The Arkansas International and many other journals. Charlotte taught Introduction to Narrative Medicine at Barnard College for over a decade and is the author of The Girl Pages: A Handbook of Resources for Strong, Confident, Creative Girls (Hyperion). She graduated from Columbia University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Master of Science in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. 

David Grubin is a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer who has produced over 100 films, ranging across history, art, poetry, and science, winning every award in the field of documentary television, including two Alfred I. Dupont awards, three George Foster Peabody prizes, five Writers Guild prizes, and ten Emmys.

His biographies for the PBS series American Experience – Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided; LBJ; Truman; TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt; and FDR – have set the standard for television biography. His five-part series for PBS – Healing And The Mind with Bill Moyers – has won many awards, and the companion book, for which he was executive editor, rose to number one on The New York Times Best Sellers list, remaining on the list for 32 weeks. His award-winning independent feature film Downtown Express has been screened at festivals in America and abroad. Grubin has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College. He recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from Pacific University.

A former chairman of the board of directors of The Film Forum, he is currently a member of the Society of American Historians, and sits on the board at Poets House. Grubin has taught documentary film producing in Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program, and has lectured on filmmaking across the country.

Liza Halley works as an elementary school Library Teacher. Liza helped establish the poet laureate position in her hometown of Arlington, MA. She loves to build community through the written word, be it through poetry, zines, or comics. She co-founded Write Around Portland, an organization that believes writing is a powerful tool for individual and societal transformation, self-expression, healing and the realization of the dignity of one’s self and others.

For over two decades Devorah Harris championed California authors publishing with the NY offices of Harper & Row and Houghton Mifflin. Today Devorah loves living with her husband and kitty on Elkhorn Slough in Monterey, an ecological treasure, hand painting dyes on silks and catching new poems midair.

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. She is the author of There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2025), Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, which won the New Measure Poetry Prize selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? (2017) and A Brown Stone (2015), and the anthology, Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited.

She was the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit which from 2013-2020 conducted weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. As a co-founding director of Poetry Pollinators, Jacobson’s work continues in the community with this eco-poetry public art initiative dedicated to empowering poetry, art, education and the environment in support of declining native bee populations.  The first bee house, which displays a panel for a poem and an education panel, fully funded and supported by many local organizations, was installed by the Santa Fe River in June, 2022. Elizabeth is a Reviews Editor for the on-line literary journal Terrain.org. and she directs the poetry programs at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA).

Yeva Johnson is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Literary Mama, Obsidian, sin cesar, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere. Yeva’s poems have been anthologized in Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color, Framework of the Human Body, and When We Exhale, among others. Johnson is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence (RADAR Productions/San Francisco Public Library), winner of the 2020 Mostly Water Art & Poetry Splash Contest and 3^rd place winner of the 2022 Effie Lee Morris Literary Contest of the Women’s National Book Association. Yeva is a poet in QTPOC4SHO, a San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective and was a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at Mesa Refuge Residency. Johnson authored the Introduction to A Sturdy Yes of a People: Selected Writings by Joan Nestle published by Sinister Wisdom in 2022. Her debut poetry chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, will be published by Nomadic Press in 2023.

Owen Lewis, author of four collections of poetry, A Prayer of Six Wings (2025), Field Light (Distinguished Favorite, 2020 NYCBigBookAward; 2021 “Must Read”, Mass Book Awards), Marriage Map and Sometimes Full of Daylight, all from Dos Madres Press, and two chapbooks. best man was the recipient of the 2016 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Other prizes include: Second Prize 2018 Wigtown (Scotland) International Poetry Competition; Finalist, 2017 Pablo Neruda Award; First prize, the 2016 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine; commendation in 2020 The Troubadour International Poetry Contest. His poetry is included in the 2022 anthology, Stay Thirsty Poets and has appeared in Nimrod, Poetry Wales, The Mississippi Review, Southward, The Four Way Review, and Moment. His literary essays/reviews have recently appeared in Intima, Ink Sweat & Tears, Presence, Wordpeace, and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is a professor of psychiatry, Columbia University where he teaches Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics.

Shir Lovett-Graff is a writer, community organizer, ritual-creator, and religious professional. They currently serve as the Executive Director for the Attleboro Area Interfaith Collaborative; and a co-founder of Matir Asurim: Jewish Care Network for Incarcerated People.

They have a masters in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School; and a Bachelors in Literature from New College of Florida.

Selected as one of the most influential women in literature in 2022, Leah Huete de Maines is the publisher of Finishing Line Press (a division of FLP Media). She acquired FLP in 2002. She has edited over 800 poetry collections, including several award-winning titles. She is Poet-in-Residence Emerita of Northern Kentucky University (funded in part by the Kentucky Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities). Maines is the author of two poetry books. Her first book was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Williams Carlos Williams Book Award (Poetry Society of America). Looking to the East with Western Eyes, New Women’s Voices Series, No. 1 (Finishing Line Press, 1998) reached #10 in the “Cincinnati/Tri-State Best Sellers List” (Cincinnati Enquirer), and is now in its fourth printing. Her most recent collection, Beyond the River, (KWC Press, 2002, 1st edition) won the Kentucky Writers’ Coalition Poetry Chapbook Competition in 2002. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international publications including Nebo, Owen Wister Review, Licking River Review, Flyway and other literary magazines and anthologies. Maines lived in Gifu, Japan where she studied and researched classical Japanese poetry at Gifu University. She also studied at Kings College London, England and The Marino Institute in Dublin, Ireland. Maines studied publishing at Yale SOM.

Born in Israel to American parents, Danny Maseng first came to the United States to star on Broadway in ‘Only Fools Are Sad.‘ A playwright, actor, singer and composer, Danny has served as Evaluator of New American Plays/Opera-Musical Theater for the National Endowment for the Arts, as the Director of the Spielberg Fellowships for the FJC, as Spiritual Leader of URJ congregation Agudas Achim in NY and as Cantor of Temple Israel of Hollywood in California. Danny is most excited to now be the Chazzan and Spiritual Leader of Makom LA, a newish,Jewish, dynamic, post-denominational community, in Los Angeles.

Danny’s critically acclaimed off-Broadway musical ‘Wasting Time with Harry Davidowitz: The Musical Journey of a Jewish Soul,’ along with his innovative ‘Soul on Fire’ and ‘Let There Be Light‘ productions, are just three exciting projects that have earned Danny accolades. Danny is also one of the most popular and respected composers of contemporary Liturgical and Synagogue music. 

Danny has been the Patron Artist of the Avraham Geiger School for Cantorial Arts in Berlin, Germany. Danny’s essays, writings and poems, have been included in recent books by leading Jewish rabbis and scholars, and he has been featured in a number of documentary films including the popular ‘Hava Nagila,’ and ‘The Other Men in Black.‘

Danny has had a long and celebrated career with appearances on television (Law and Order), Broadway, and film. His books include the novel ‘Apollonia‘, ‘The Passion, the Beauty, the Heartbreak:The History of Israel Through Music and Poetry’, ‘Spiritual Cooking in the Time of the Plague.’ Danny has also created ‘Black Milk,’ an Oratorio about poet Paul Celan.

Danny has been a faculty member for major organizations including Limmud, JCM, Elat Chayyim, The Wexner Heritage Foundation, and is deeply involved in interfaith dialogue. A much sought-after Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Danny travels the world, inspiring, teaching, and rekindling the love of Judaism through Torah, Hassidut, Jewish Culture, and the Arts.

Josh Rolnick’s short story collection, “Pulp and Paper,” won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, selected by Yiyun Li. His short stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. They have been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Gulf Coast, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. Josh holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and an MA in Writing from The Johns Hopkins University. He formerly served as fiction editor at the Iowa Review as well as Unstuck: A literary annual. Josh has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, and has appeared as a guest lecturer at Johns Hopkins and Akron University. He currently serves as an advisor for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and teaches fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop.

Melissa K. Rosen, Director of Training and Education at Sharsheret, holds a master’s degree in Jewish Communal Service from Brandeis University (1991) and has been working in the non-profit sector for over 30 years. Her professional experience includes informal education and programming, advocacy, and community outreach. Melissa’s work has allowed her to facilitate unique and lasting connections among organizations in the diverse American Jewish community.

Melissa oversees community education throughout the country, as well as the training of health care professionals, Jewish professionals, and Sharsheret’s volunteers. She also manages the Community Partnership Program. Herself a breast cancer survivor, she is passionate about the Jewish community and cancer support and advocacy.

Jane Saginaw is the author of Because the World is Round, a memoir that recounts a family trip around the world in 1970 with her mother who used a wheelchair because of polio paralysis. She is a student in the Ph.D. Program in Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. Before returning to graduate school, Jane was a trial lawyer with Baron & Budd in Dallas, Texas. She served in the Clinton Administration as the Regional Administrator of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region Six. In 2006, she was awarded Trail Lawyer of the Year by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice for her environmental work involving groundwater contamination in Tucson, Arizona. Jane’s undergraduate degree is in cultural geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her law degree is from the University of Texas, Austin. In 2023 she earned a Masters in Humanities from the University of Texas, Dallas. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Athenaeum Review, Image, D Magazine, and PB Daily.

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a professor of psychology and public health at the University of Southern California. Her first career was as a professional flutist. She followed her flute teacher to the Netherlands and ended up staying for 22 years. She had always written poetry, and her only way into the Dutch culture was through their poets. That’s how she learned Dutch, and she still translates Dutch poetry. During her years in the Netherlands, she slowly seeped into academia – for fun, at first, but then it became her next way of life. She married, had a child, and then moved back to California with her family. Always restless, she attended rabbinical school for a year and a half but found she couldn’t combine it with a career in academia, a family, and the increasing space that writing poetry took in her life. Her poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as the Copper Nickel, RHINO, The Cortland Review, The Tahoma Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (with co-author Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). She is the author of the full-length collections, To Phrase a Prayer for Peace (Wildhouse Publishing, 2025) and General Release from the Beginning of the World, chosen by Brenda Hillman, (Free Verse Editions, 2023).