Workshops

Texts like the Torah and New Testament are often presented as not only sacred but inviolate and above reproach. For many of us, this means these texts and their difficult subject matter can feel far from us, or so close and well known we can no longer really see them. Yet it is here we find the stories and rituals, commandments and prohibitions, that—whether or not we follow a religious tradition of our own—have shaped the world in which we live. With close readings of work by poets including Marie Howe, Ada Limon, Leila Chatti, and Eleanor Wilner, in this workshop, Jessica Jacobs, author of unalone, a collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis, will share how drawing on the ancient Jewish practice of midrashic inquiry, as well as the Jesuit practice of Ignatian Contemplation, can help us to delve into a text and find the stories and knowledge waiting beyond the surface layer of the page. 

Co-Sponsored by Lilith

Jessica Jacobs, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with Genesis (Four Way Books, March 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, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review, and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared widely and she offers readings, talks, and workshops around the country, teaching for programs including the Fine Arts Work Center and the Collegeville Institute.

She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Writing Shekhinah

One of the most ancient functions of poetry is to make divine presence perceptible through language. This class will probe the intersections between language, poetry, and the Shekhinah, Jewish tradition’s name for divine presence, an aspect of God that who is present in human time, space, relationships, and communities, and shares our lives and sufferings rather than looking down on them from above. Unlike other ancient forms of divine presence, many of which emerge through prophecy, vision, and received traditions, the Shekhinah first emerged in writing by rabbis who knew that the Shekhinah, a rabbinic term derived from a Biblical verb used to refer to God “dwelling” among the Israelites, did not appear in the Torah or earlier traditions. Instead, the Shekhinah was a conception of divine presence (actually many conceptions) developed by the rabbis, not in response to revelation but to human spiritual needs. We will explore some of the texts in which the Shekhinah first emerged as well as later, quite different, female-identified versions of Her, including medieval mystical texts and poetry by Jewish feminists working to raise the Shekhinah’s profile in contemporary Judaism. We will discuss these texts both to get to know some of the many things Shekhinah and divine presence have meant in Jewish tradition, and also to understand the linguistic techniques they use to conceive and evoke Her. We will practice these techniques through exercises designed to help us use our own writing to search for, question, imagine, encounter, and respond to the Shekhinah, or whatever we understand as presence beyond the human.

Joy Ladin has published ten books of poetry, including National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna, Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation, and newly published Shekhinah Speaks (Selva Oscura). She is also the author of a memoir, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger. Visit Joy’s profile in Yetzirah’s Jewish Poets Database.

What objects do you hold sacred? A ring, a key, a house, or a text? This generative workshop assumes that objects hold energy and power in our lives. Consider the torah, dressed in velvet and draped in silver, for which an entire congregation stands, this sacred text that a rabbi will only touch with a pointer (yad). Consider the menorah, the candles, and the glorious lights of Chanukah, the radiant inner lives of these objects, what they see, say, and can reveal to us.

This workshop will focus on uses of imagery—all sensory information—to explore sacred objects in our lives and honor their magic and mystery.  Authors studied may include Bert Meyers, Gertrude Stein, Alicia Ostriker, Lucie Brock-Broido, and others. We will spend time together reading, writing, and sharing.

Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship, the Lucille Medwick  Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Poetry  Foundation, and other honors. Her books include The Animal Is Chemical  (Four Way Books, 2024), awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry; The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013),  awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; and The Frame Called Ruin (New  Issues, 2012), awarded the Margie Book Prize. A reader for Poetry Magazine, she is a Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Torah does not deal with love very often, but when it does, it is life-changing.  In this workshop, we will read biblical texts dealing with four love-relationships.  Writing midrash, we discover what the stories can mean for our own lives, our own time, our own language. Writing midrash, we surprise ourselves. We surprise each other.  It’s almost like being in love.

Session 1 based on Isaac’s love of Rebecca (Gen 24: 67, and all that leads up to it and follows it)

Session 2:  Jacob’s love of Rachel (especially Gen 29:11, 18-20, 30) and its consequences.

Session 3:  Jonathon’s love for David (1 Samuel 18:1-3; 19:1-7; 20:1-23; 2 Samuel 1:1-26

Session 4:  The Song of Songs (all)

Alicia Ostriker is both a poet and a critic. As a prose writer she is best known for her book Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. She has also published several other books on poetry and on the Bible. As a poet she has published 20 chapbooks and full collections, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. Her most recent book is The Holy and Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time (2024).

The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, before his death in 1940 when he took his own life to avoid being murdered as a Jew in Europe, wrote: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Urging us to recognize the complexity of historical events, Benjamin asks that we avoid simplistic narratives celebrating progress without acknowledging the costs: the suffering and exploitation of others. 

Poeticizing history requires careful and complex consideration. The ethics of transforming tragedy into poems presents a complex moral landscape, prompting critical reflection on the artist’s function, the audience’s experience, and the very nature of art itself. Yet poetry can play a meaningful role in offering testimony and portraying history beyond the mere chronicling of a moment in time. It can be a conduit for commemoration; a means of bearing witness; and a way of pushing the borders of how we look at both the distant and recent past. It can also be a way of giving voice to people who can no longer speak for themselves, providing unsaid perspectives of those who have been silenced. 

There is, for instance, the tradition of documentary poetry that places lyric meditation alongside historical source material and records. Such work enables poets and readers to engage in intimate explorations of events and lives from the past while grappling with ethical questions concerning issues of poetic representation. 

How can poetry present Jewish history, promoting Judaism and Jewish values, whether rooted in records of the collective past or in an individual’s story? Is it valid, in such dark times such as ours, to use poems as a means of working toward tikkun olam, the repairing of the world, although the poet W. H. Auden has written that “Poetry makes nothing happen?” 

In this generative workshop, I will refer to the approaches I took in writing my book of poems, Aunt Bird, in which I try to imagine the life and death during the Holocaust of one of my aunts. As a group, we will also read poems by Emma Lazarus, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Miklós Radnóti, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht and Ilya Kaminsky, among others. 

Through reading, discussion, and writing, we will consider different ways of approaching Jewish history as it occurred, and as it is being made.

Yerra Sugarman’s three volumes of poetry are: Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022), which won American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry; The Bag of Broken Glass (Sheep Meadow, 2008), poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone (Sheep Meadow, 2002), winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature, and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She serves on the Board of Yetzirah, and co-curates its reading series.

In this generative workshop we will study and discuss a range of pre-selected passages from classical Jewish texts such as extracts from the Talmud, verses from the Hebrew Bible, and commentaries by medieval and later rabbis. We will then look at how poets have brought language or ideas from some of these texts into their poems. We’ll study poems by such poets as John Milton, John Keats, Dan Pagis, T.S. Eliot, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Yehoshua November, and more. Finally, we will engage with these writings by beginning our own poems in response to them.

Eve Grubin is the author of the collections of poems: Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), The House of Our First Loving, a chapbook, (Rack Press, 2016), and Grief Dialogue, a chapbook, (Rack Press, 2022). Her next book of poems, Boat of Letters, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She teaches at NYU London and The Poetry School. More information can be found at www.evegrubin.com. Visit Eve’s profile in our Discover Jewish Poets database.

“Each and every grass has a song” – Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav

The Jewish environmental movement has sought to excavate and breathe new life into ancient texts that call us to right relationship with this fragile and holy earth. Jewish poets vividly describe the human encounter with plants, animals, and the elements where they often find intimations of the Divine or cause for protest on behalf of the non-human world. Together we’ll read poetry and other Jewish writings that will inspire our own experiments with ecopoetry. Some poets we will read include Marge Piercy, Muriel Rukeyser, Alicia Ostriker, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Stanley Moss, Stuart Kestenbaum, Phillip Levine, Mónica Gomery, and more! We’ll engage in writing exercises, some of which will take us outside to our local environments to allow us to listen to, and translate, the voices of the earth. You will come away with a deepened appreciation for Jewish wisdom on the environment and a number of poem drafts that will help you envision your personal Torah of the earth.

“Songs of the Grass: Exploring Jewish Ecopoetry was a powerful class for me to take when I was working on a project related to climate justice and responding with bravery to emotions around climate change. Looking at these issues through a Jewish lens added depth to my writing and thinking. Hila created a thoughtful and engaged community in the course, and sessions included rich discussion of source texts followed by writing exercises that were both generative and nourishing.”– Elisa McCool, previous participant in Songs of the Grass

Hila Ratzabi’s first full-length book of poetry, There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), won a 2023 gold Nautilus Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. She was a finalist for the North American Review’s 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction, for the Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize (2019), and for the Fifth Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Contest (2013). She is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Apparatus of Visible Things (2009). Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Linebreak, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and other journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She has received scholarships and fellowships to the Willapa Bay AiR residency, the Vermont Studio Center, the Crater Lake National Park residency, and the Arctic Circle Residency. Ratzabi is the former editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Storyscape and holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She was director of virtual content & programs at Ritualwell.org (2015–2023). Ratzabi is currently director of communications at North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, IL. She lives in Oak Park, IL, with her husband and two children. Visit Hila’s profile in our Discover Jewish Poets database.

In this generative workshop, we will look at a Hasidic mystical text that explores the relationship between imagery and abstraction during the watershed moment when the Torah was received at Mount Sinai. Then, taking our cue from Hasidic mysticism and contemporary poetry, we will attempt to harness the dynamic interplay of imagery and abstraction as we work toward generating several new poems.

Yehoshua November is the author of God’s Optimism (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize), and The Concealment of Endless Light (Orison Books, 2024). His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Sun, VQR, TriQuarterly, and on National Public Radio and Poetry Unbound. November teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and Touro University and serves as mashpia, spiritual mentor, at Chabad of Teaneck. Visit Yehoshua’s profile in our Discover Jewish Poets database.

“The word verse,” writes Edward Hirsch in A Poet’s Glossary, “is traditionally thought to derive from the Latin versus, meaning a ‘line,’ ‘row,’ or ‘furrow.’ The metaphor of ‘plough’ for ‘write’ thus dates to antiquity. Verse may alternately derive from the Latin vertere, ‘to turn.’” 

Turning and returning: these are also essential moves for Jewish people, especially during the ten Days of Awe, bookended by Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and preceded by the month of Elul on the Hebrew calendar. During this period, Jewish people are called upon to reflect on ways we have missed the mark–in our personal and communal lives–over the last year and to commit to redirecting our efforts to living in a way that is intended to be of benefit to ourselves and others. The process we engage in throughout the holiday season is called teshuvah, turning, or, as commonly translated, repenting.

In this exploratory, generative workshop, we’ll look at a few of the ways poems turn–from line to line, phrase to phrase, word to word, maybe even syllable to syllable. We’ll practice making similar turns in a few lines of our own. And we’ll invite ourselves to look for ways–subtle and bold–we might make some turns in our own lives as we head into the High Holiday period.

Richard Howard, as cited by Hirsch, has said, “process proceeds, verse reverses.” Through this workshop, in addition to writing and rewriting a few lines (who knows, maybe even a draft of an entire poem!) we may find an area in our lives which would benefit from a reversal.

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. New poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in The Sun, Pensive, Vita Poetica, and in Revisiting the Rothko Chapel, a book of scholarly and creative reflections on “the intersecting spiritual and aesthetic dimensions that give the Rothko Chapel its great power.” 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 the Treasurer of Yetzirah. Visit Rick’s profile in our Discover Jewish Poets database.

We will read poems from Jewish poets of Eastern Europe and elsewhere and we will marvel together on the idea of poetic lineages: how do poets learn from other poets across time and geography? Is there such a thing as a poetics of diaspora? poetics of exile? How do poets enter in conversation with poets that came before them? How do poets bring back to life the authors who came before them and were (unjustly) forgotten? How can our own words grow and change as we overhear conversations between other poets, on and off the page? I hope that in our time together we will all ask impossible questions—and then try to answer them with unpredictable new lyrics.

This workshop is a modified version of the one Ilya taught at our 2023 Jewish Poetry Conference, to give you a taste of Yetzirah’s conference offerings.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former USSR and came to USA in 1993 when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo) and Deaf Republic (Graywolf) as well as co-editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins), Homage to Paul Celan (Marick) and many other books. He has also translated books by Marina Tsvetaeva, Polina Barskova, Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky, among others. His work has received The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Guggenheim Fellowship, and was shortlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.  Visit Ilya’s profile in Yetzirah’s Jewish Poets Database.

Spiritual experience often feels private, isolating, uncommunicable. Spiritual autobiographies, from anecdotes to full-blown memoirs, use storytelling techniques to break down this sense of isolation, offering others glimpses of our own struggles and exaltations, and, more importantly, because readers interpret narratives by identifying with characters and projecting our own lives onto events in stories, turning our private experiences into stories through which others can recognize, reflect on, and be inspired in their own spiritual journeys. In this generative writing workshop we will look at examples of spiritual anecdote and autobiography, discuss the communicability and incommunicability of spiritual experience, and practice using midrash, haiku, and self-inventory to develop our own spiritual narratives.

• 3 recorded classes, followed by recorded Q&As
• handouts with representative texts and prompts to guide your writing

$72—standard registration

$59—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.

Joy Ladin has published ten books of poetry, including National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna, Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation, and newly published Shekhinah Speaks  (Selva Oscura). She is also the author of a memoir, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist The Soul of the Stranger. Visit Joy’s profile in Yetzirah’s Jewish Poets Database.