Anna Goodman Herrick
Writer
Biography
Anna Goodman Herrick is the author of A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole (Monkfish, 2024). She has performed her poetry across the U.S., including at the Emily Dickinson Museum and the Artist Uprising at the El Paso border. Anna has created work for television and branded content for Teen Vogue, Sony, ABC Family, Oprah Winfrey Network and MTV and shared her work at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bloomsday on Broadway, and in film, stage, VR, museums and galleries nationwide.
Her poetry is included in Rattle, The Los Angeles Press, The Ekphrastic Review, Hevria Magazine, and Ritualwell, and her liturgical poetry has been shared by numerous Jewish congregations.
Her book, A Speaker is a Wilderness, weaves Jewish sacred texts, mysticism, human rights, and a modern voice of radical love, taking readers on a path of healing from brokenness to wholeness. The book invites readers to reconsider prayer and blessing as an ongoing, fluid, language, holding space for the reverent and irreverent as prophetic. The grandchild of an Auschwitz survivor, Anna’s been a New York City club kid, MTV writer-producer, a peacemaker around the world, nun at a Vedanta convent, and student of Chassidic rabbis. This expansiveness lives in her poems.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole, by Anna Goodman Herrick, weaves Jewish sacred texts, mysticism, human rights, and a modern voice of radical love, taking readers on a path of healing from brokenness to wholeness. Her work includes exploring generational healing through ancestral Jewish wisdom.
Published Works
A Speaker is a Wilderness: Poems on the Sacred Path from Broken to Whole (Monkfish, 2024)
Links to Sample Works
- Ritualwell, “Blessing for Diaspora as a Spiritual Practice”
- Rattle Magazine, “On the Last Day of Passover”
- Hevria, “Rough Bark”
