Generative Workshop: “Writing Shekhinah” with Joy Ladin
Register for this workshop here.
You can order Joy’s book here, with a percentage of every purchase going to support Yetzirah.
“The Shekhinah” is Jewish tradition’s name for divine presence, an aspect of God who is present in human time, space, relationships, and communities, and shares our lives and sufferings rather than looking down on them from above. This class will explore the Shekhinah not as a fixed idea of divine presence but as a creative writing genre, a millennia-old prompt that invites us to imagine divine presence in ways that enable us to recognize and relate to divinity in our own lives and world, even – especially – when divinity is hard to find.
We will learn from and build on examples of how earlier generations have responded to this prompt, from the early rabbinic texts in which the Shekhinah first emerged after the Roman destruction made God hard to find, to the medieval mystical versions in which the Shekhinah was decisively identified as female, to poetry by contemporary Jewish feminists who imagined the Shekhinah in ways that connected Her to contemporary needs, concerns, and lives. Each example we discuss will be accompanied by writing prompts that invite us to build on, talk back to, or otherwise use earlier versions of the Shekhinah to write our own.
Note: This class is designed to work both for those who took an earlier version of it, and for those who are new to this subject.
Workshop Dates & Cost
October 14 – October 28, 2026, 1:00-2:00 PM
$108—standard registration
$87—18% discounted registration for Yetzirah Members (you can become a member here)
*As we want our offerings to be accessible to all, there is a pay-what-you-can option if this pricing is a hardship. No one will be turned away for lack of funds, but please contact Program Coordinator Kyra Lisse at klisse@yetzirahpoets.org if you would like a sliding-scale ticket.
About Joy
Joy Ladin has published ten books of poetry, most recently Shekhinah Speaks (Selva Oscura Press, 2022); National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna; The Future is Trying to Tell Us; Something: New and Selected Poems; 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 another work of creative nonfiction, the Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. 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.
