Joy Ladin

Biography

Joy Ladin has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Family (Persea) and Shekhinah Speaks (selva oscura); National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna;  and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation. She is also the author of a memoir of gender transition, the National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life, and two other  works of creative nonfiction, the Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, and Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors. She has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including an On Being with Krista Tippett interview that has been rebroadcast several times.

Published Works

Poetry
Shekhinah Speaks (selva oscura press, 2022)
The Book of Anna (revised second edition, with Afterword; EOAGH, 2021)
The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017)
Fireworks in the Graveyard (Headmistress Press, 2017)
Answers to the Name “Lucky.” (Chapbook; Delphi Series #2, Blue Lyra Press. 2016)
Impersonation: Poems 2004-2014 (Sheep Meadow Press. 2015)
The Definition of Joy (Sheep Meadow Press, 2012)
Coming to Life (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010)
 Psalms (Wipf & Stock, 2010)
Transmigration (Sheep Meadow Press, 2009)
The Book of Anna (Sheep Meadow Press, 2007)
Alternatives to History (Sheep Meadow Press, 2003)

Prose
The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (HBI Series on Jewish Women; Brandeis University Press, 2018)
Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012)
Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry (VDM Publishing, 2010)

Links to Sample Works

• Poetry, “Comfort Animal” (with audio)
• Academy of American Poets, “Flourishing”
• Academy of American Poets, “Time Passes”

Subject Matter

Childhood, Cultural Identity, Death, Family, Gender, Jewish Mysticism, Loss, Love, Marriage, Midrash, Parenting, Whiteness, Feminism, LGBTQ+, Disability.