2025 Jewish Poetry Conference Archive

Thank you to our conference partner

Our event cosponsors

And gratitude to our local supporters

Keynote Speaker

Edward Hirsch, a Chicago native and MacArthur Fellow, is a celebrated poet and tireless advocate for poetry.

He has published ten books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son, and Stranger by Night. He has also published eight books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, and The Heart of American Poetry.

His new book, a stand-up comedy and Skokie elegy, is a startling memoir, My Childhood in Pieces. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the National Jewish Book Award.

He taught at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Since 2003, he has been president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Workshop 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.

Conference Manuscript Faculty

Alicia Ostriker has published seventeen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After; Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; No Heaven; The Volcano Sequence; and The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She was twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and twice a National Jewish Book Award winner. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Ostriker’s critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on American poetry and on the Bible.

Dayenu Workshop Faculty

Yehoshua November is the author of God’s Optimism (a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize), Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and Paterson Poetry Prize), and The Concealment of Endless Light. His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Sun, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and on National Public Radio and On Being’s Poetry Unbound podcast program. He teaches writing at Rutgers and Touro University.

2025 Conference Cohort, Staff, & Board

  Conference Staff
Shelby Sizemore, Conference Manager
Cory Weller, Photographer
Alexa Hulse, Intern
Kristen Lopez, Intern
Micah Pava, Intern
Kylee Rieger, Intern
SJ Waring, Intern

2025 Board & Staff
Jessica Jacobs, Founder, President, & Executive Director
Cindy Savett, Vice President & Director of Philanthropy
Yerra Sugarman, Secretary & Reading Series Co-Host
Rick Baron, Treasurer 
Rick Chess, Board Member & Book Club Host
Maya Bernstein, Board Member
Danny Kraft, Program Manager

2025 Dayenu Cohort