Yetzirah
Board of Directors

Cindy Savett 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.

Richard A. Baron 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.

Aviva Dautch is a British poet, academic and magazine publisher who is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK’s quarterly Jewish arts magazine and the leading Jewish cultural publication in Europe. In 2023 she was Chair of the judging panel for the Wingate Literary Prize for Jewish Literature. Aviva has an MA (Distinction) in Creative and Life Writing, a PhD in contemporary poetry, and is the inaugural Vera Fine-Grodzinski Research Fellow in Jewish Women’s Voices at Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing. Aviva was a winner of the Primers Prize (the UK’s National poetry prize for emerging voices) in 2018. Her commissions and residencies include The Jewish Museum London, The British Museum and The National Gallery, and she is the literary co-translator for Afgan journalist and poet Suhrab Sirat. Aviva is resident poetry expert for the BBC Radio 4 series On Form and a regular arts broadcaster for Front Row.

David Grubin has been a documentary filmmaker for decades, winning numerous prizes including five from the Writer’s Guild, ten Emmys and a Guggenheim fellowship. His series from the Dodge Poetry Festival, The Power of the Word and The Language of Life for PBS, both with Bill Moyers, brought the work of contemporary poets to a wide audience. He serves on the board at Poets House. Grubin received an MFA in writing poetry from Pacific University in 2025. His poems have appeared in Narrative, Gyroscope, and Minyan. The American Poetry Review published his essay, Stanley Kunitz and the Wilderness of Age.

Liza Halley works as an elementary school Library Teacher. Liza helped establish the Poet Laureate position in her hometown of Arlington, MA. She is the co-founder of Write Around Portland, a nonprofit based in Portland, OR that amplifies voices and builds community through writing  workshops, literary programming, books, and readings. She loves to build  community through the written word, whether through poetry, zines, or comics. She co-founded the Boston-area Yetzirah group. Her poems have been published in Braided Way Magazine: Faces and Voices of Spiritual Practice, The Amethyst Review, and The Calul Journal High Holiday Folio. 

Chesky Kopel is an editor at The Lehrhaus, an antitrust lawyer, and a freelance writer. He is married to Talya and father to Lev, Shai, and Romy. 

Beth Kanter (she/her) is a writer, reporter, and creative nonfiction and narrative writing workshop leader based in Washington, DC. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals including X-R-A-Y, Whale Road Review, HAD, Jet Fuel Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Identity Theory, and Lilith. Her features, reported pieces, and essays have run in dozens of publications including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Paste, The Writer, Parents, Kveller, and Curbed. Beth earned an MSJ from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Her novel-in-progress, Paved with Gold, received a UCLA James Kirkwood Literary Prize. Beth has had the privilege of serving on several boards of organizations that do meaningful work including nine years, two as chair, with the McClendon Center, a DC nonprofit that provides behavioral and mental health care, medical care coordination, and community-based supports to all regardless of their financial, medical, or housing status.

Ma’ayan Seligsohn is a gardener, writer, and teacher. He served many years as a Rebbetzin at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale giving pastoral care and support to the congregation. During these years, Ma’ayan also was an organizer with JCRC, NY Caring Majority, and JFREJ, helping to bridge the space between the orthodox Jewish community and the wider neighborhoods in the Bronx and NYC. He is a SVARA trained educator and loves witnessing adults fall in love with ancient Jewish texts. Ma’ayan lives in Philadelphia with his husband, R’ Ezra, and their three children.

Jessica Jacobs, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with Genesis (Four Way Books, 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 and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poetry and essays have appeared widely and she offers readings, talks, and workshops around the country, teaching for programs including the Fine Arts Work Center, Festival of Faith & Writing, and The Farminary (Princeton Theological Seminary). She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Maya Bernstein’s writing has appeared in the Cider Press Review, the Eunoia Review, Kveller, Lilith Magazine, Poetica Magazine, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. She is on faculty at Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership, the Masa Leadership Center, and Yeshivat Maharat, and is pursuing an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first collection is There Is No Place Without You (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022).

Richard Chess is the author of five books of poetry: The Loneliest Monk (Orison Books, 2026); 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 thirty 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.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine books of poems, including most recently, Wild Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2021), 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. Her tenth book of poems, Civilians, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in Spring 2025.

Jehanne’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in numerous other venues. Recent essays have appeared in The New England Review, Colorado Review, The Common, The Seneca Review, Image, Guernica, and West Branch. She is the founding editor of the national literary journal, Cherry Tree.

Jehanne earned a B.A. in the “Great Books” from St. John’s College, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Jehanne’s writing moves between traditional forms, free verse, prose poetry, lyric essay, autotheory, and personal essay. In Stateside and Dots & Dashes (and in her forthcoming collection, Civilians), she examines her experiences as a military spouse and explores the tradition of war literature. In books like The Arranged Marriage, From the Fever-World, and The Hardship Post, she writes about the Shoah, intergenerational trauma, and the challenges of representing violence on the page. Her collections, Wild Kingdom, Simple Machines, American Samizdat, and Red Army Red, consider the intersection of power, cruelty, and authoritarianism. Jehanne is also passionate about the five senses; she has written about the art and science of perfume in throughsmoke: an essay in notes and about our sense of taste in Taste: A Book of Small Bites. And, in Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity, she looks at the act of looking itself. She is currently at work on a book-length essay about frivolous things, people, and pursuits, Frivolity: A Defense. She is also writing a craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma.

Jehanne has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Book Award, the Editors’ Prize in Prose from Bat City Review, the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction from The Bellevue Literary Review, the Firecracker Award in Prose from CLMP, an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Mississippi Review Prize in Poetry, the Poetry by the Sea Book Award, the Towson University Prize for Literature,  a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and a Howard Nemerov Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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 two Bedlington Terriers 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 About Trauma, a series of new books published by University of New Mexico Press that 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. She was a founding board member of Yetzirah.

David Ebenbach 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 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 and served as the Secretary of Yetzirah’s founding Board of Directors.

Yerra Sugarman 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.

Her poems, articles, and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, The Nation, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, and elsewhere.

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. She is the Secretary of Yetzirah’s Board of Directors.