Program Associates

Dan Rosenberg is the author of Bassinet (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022), cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012). He has also written two chapbooks, Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn, 2015) and A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press, 2010), and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome (Zephyr Press, 2016). His work has won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Rosenberg holds a B.A. from Tufts University, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from The University of Georgia, where he was a Presidential Fellow. He is the chair of the English department at Wells College, where he  teaches literature, creative writing, and translation theory. He also coordinates the Wells College Visiting Writers Series and edits the Wells College Press Chapbook Contest. Rosenberg lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife, essayist and poet Alicia Rebecca Myers, and their son, Miles.

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.

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.

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.

Richard Chess is the author of four books of poetry, 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 30 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.