Yetzirah 2025 Jewish Poetry Conference: Public Events, June 24-27, 2025

Curious about our previous conferences? View videos of public events and learn more about our keynote, faculty, & inaugural cohort:

Thank you to our conference partner

Thank you to our event cosponsors

And gratitude to our local supporters

GENERATIVE WORKSHOPS (back to top)
Our generative workshops will be led by Sharon Dolin, Dana Levin, and Victoria Redel. Participants will be divided into three workshop cohorts, which will attend a different class each day of the conference, allowing participants to work with all three of our faculty. 

Called by Avivah Zornberg “a powerfully gifted psalmist,” Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Manual for Living (Pittsburgh, 2016). Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge (Pittsburgh, 2008) won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir and two books of translation from Catalan: Book of Minutes, by Gemma Gorga, and Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga, winner of Saturnalia Books’ Malinda A Markham Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. A 2021 NEA Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize Winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, Dolin lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and teaches poetry workshops. Learn more about Sharon in our Discover Jewish Poets Database.

Sharon’s Workshop: God-Wrestling: Poetry as Prayer
A poem is “an act of attention” according to D.H. Lawrence, and according to Simone Weil, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” In this generative workshop we will explore the realm of poetry as prayer. In Jewish liturgy, there is nothing more central than the psalms, which are lyric poems—an individual voice addressing God. Starting with the psalms and moving on to other devotional and defiant voices, this generative workshop will focus on poems as prayers from Jewish and non-Jewish voices, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Denise Levertov, Leila Chatti, Yehuda HaLevi, Yona Wallach, and Allen Ginsberg. What happens when we open ourselves up to addressing the Divine Presence/Shekhina (or the possibility of one) that is invisible and omnipresent? How can we explore and challenge through poetry our own fundamental beliefs including unbelief? If one meaning of the name Israel is God-wrestlers, the poems you will be invited to read and write will all be ways of grappling with the Divine. Believers and nonbelievers are welcome.

Dana Levin is the author of five books poetry. Her latest is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press), a 2022 New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” Other books include Banana Palace (2016) and Sky Burial (2011), which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Recent poems and essays have appeared in Poem-a-day, Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other publications. She is a grateful recipient of many honors, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, and the Library of Congress, as well as from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. With Adele Elise Williams, she co-edited Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master (2023) for the Unsung Masters Series. Levin teaches for the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College, and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. Learn more about Dana in our Discover Jewish Poets Database.

Dana’s Workshop: Wandering in the Wilderness
Writing: it can feel like an experience of divine guidance—and divine abandonment.  How does captivity in doubt, inspiration’s rescue, and wandering in uncertainty inform your writing practice?  What is your personal golden calf, the false idol you think can tell you “I am who I am” as a writer? In this workshop, we will engage the writer’s wandering in wilderness through psychological, spiritual, and aesthetic lenses, with generative writing leading the way. A few weeks before the conference, participants will be encouraged to survey their current drafts and identify the poem—or the subject matter—they just can’t seem to “bring home” and actualize its promise. I will send you instructions for how we will make use of this material to generate more poetry. Our session together will be aided also by a deep dive into Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, one of the crucial twentieth century chronicles of exile and return.

Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently the collection Paradise (2022) and the novel Before Everything. Victoria’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated in ten languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O, and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Victoria is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. Learn more about Victoria in our Discover Jewish Poets Database.

Victoria’s Workshop: Persona: Finding Self Through Empathic Voice and Imagination
In Kabbalah, Tikkun Olam, the repair, is a mystical return through ritual performance. Might slipping on the “mask” of persona in poetry be a way to that divine light and to our most empathic selves? Additionally Persona allows us to slip off the self, freeing us from the burden of personal history. In our workshop we will consider where the I begins separate from the voices, ancestors, characters, cultural figures that inform it. How do we feel another? How deeply can we allow ourselves to experience another and what do we learn about ourselves that we dare not see when we stare in the mirror. What are our choices, opportunities and obligations as we assume persona?  With exercises and examples by Adrienne Rich, Marie Howe, Louise Gluck, Olga Broumas and others we will consider the gift of persona.

ELIGIBILITY (back to top)
Regardless of your religious practice or lack thereof, or whether you think of yourself or your writing as “Jewish enough,” applications are open to anyone who self-identifies as a Jewish poet and feels that such a gathering would be meaningful to them and to their poetry. In addition, we require the following:

• All applicants must be 21 years of age or older by the start of the Conference in July 2025
• To cultivate community, all applicants will be required to stay on campus (though apartments will be shared, all rooms will be single-occupancy, with accessible accommodations available)
• We also ask that participants attend all official events, unless their health requires otherwise
  • All participants will agree to take a COVID test if requested due to possible exposure (tests will be provided). More extensive COVID policies can be found below
  • All applicants will need to show proof of a negative COVID test taken within 24-hours before the first day of the conference
• FOR RETURNING PARTICIPANTS: In order to have continuity in our community year-to-year, while also making room for new participants, we ask that if a participant has joined us for two years in a row, they wait a year until applying to be a Fellow, Scholar, or Contributor.
  • On these off years, we welcome all participants to join us as part of the Dayenu Cohort.

FEES (back to top) 

• The non-refundable application fee is $20 (this can be waived if this fee is a hardship).
• Fellows receive free tuition, room, & board, which covers breakfasts and lunches and two shared on-campus dinners. They are responsible for their travel and four dinners off-campus.
• Scholars receive free tuition. They are responsible for room & board ($700), which covers breakfasts and lunches and two shared on-campus dinners,  and for their travel, and four dinners off-campus.
• Contributors are responsible for tuition ($800), room & board ($700), which covers breakfasts and lunches and two shared on-campus dinners, travel, and four dinners off-campus.
• Thanks to an anonymous donor, up to $5,000 of need-based funds will be available for accepted participants through The Miles and Mimi Coon Scholarship Fund. The individual amounts will be based on how many accepted participants apply for funding.

• Dayenu Cohort: Fee includes a pass to all public events, communal on-campus Shabbat dinner, and generative workshops: $180
  • Sliding scale available if this is a hardship.
• If you will not be applying to join us on-campus, or signing up for the Dayenu Cohort, and are only interested in attending the public conference events, an in-person pass for all public events will be available for $108. 
  • Tickets for individual events, in-person and online, will also be available, with a suggested price of $18.

APPLICATION TIMELINE (back to top)

February 1, 2025: Application period opens for all prospective participants

*To aid in the ease of our considerations, we ask that you apply as early as possible within the given application window. But please note that applications will not be taken before February 1.

For all applicants:
February 21, 2025: Application deadline
March 14, 2025: Notifications sent to all applicants
March 30, 2025: Registration deadline (a deposit of $200 will be due at this time. This will go toward Scholar’s room & board. It will be returned Fellows after the conference.)

*a waitlist of Scholars, Fellows, & Contributors will be created if an opportunity becomes available

APPLICATION CATEGORIES: CONTRIBUTORS, SCHOLARS, & FELLOWS (back to top)

CONTRIBUTORS

Applicants who wish to join the Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference as a Contributor should have a deep love of and commitment to poetry and interest in engaging further with its intersections with Jewish culture and tradition. As our largest contingent within the on-campus cohort, Contributors play a vital role in creating our community’s culture, as well as in supporting the conference, which is the most significant of Yetzirah’s annual programming expenses. Though we only require that Contributors have some record of publication, as well as a recommendation for previous experience attending generative creative writing workshops, the Contributors at both of our prior conferences were largely composed of accomplished writers who’d originally applied as either a Scholar or Fellow.

• • Fees: $1,500 tuition, which includes room & board (breakfasts, lunches, and two shared dinners)

SCHOLARS

Applicants who wish to join the Yetzirah Summer Conference as Scholars may have published up to one full-length collection of poetry, but no book-publication is required.

Competitive applicants will have published, since January 1, 2018, (not including self-published work) a minimum of:

• at least 20 or more individual poems or pages of poetry that appear in at least five literary journals, anthologies, or publications that regularly include poetry as a portion of their format.
  • Up to 16 pages of that poetry may be from a single volume of poetry that is fewer than 48 pages (e.g. a chapbook)

We believe people of any age can be an “emerging” poet and welcome writers who fulfill the above requirements, young and old, to apply for this fellowship.

• • Fees: $700 for room & board only (funding for Scholars covers the full $800 tuition )
  • In addition to waived tuition, each Scholar will be paired with a Conference Fellow to receive mentorship that includes a manuscript evaluation (of no more than 10 pages)

FELLOWS

Applicants who wish to join the Yetzirah Summer Conference as established poets should have published at least two full-length collections by a nationally-distributed press and have a strong record of publication.