2023 Inaugural Conference: Friday Fellows & Faculty Reading

After the reading ends at 7 pm, we’ll hold a Kabbalat Shabbat service (7-7:45 pm) at which all those in attendance in-person are welcome.

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books), winner of The Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection, and Foreword INDIES Finalist; and The Grammar of God (Spiegel & Grau)a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and Sami Rohr Prize Finalist. She is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in translation.

Sam Taylor is the author of three books of poems, Body of the World (Ausable Press, 2005), Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series, 2014), and The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (Negative Capability, 2021). His work, ranging in theme from ecology and social justice to sexuality and mysticism, has appeared in such journals as New Republic, AGNI, and Kenyon Review. A native of Miami, he has been a wilderness caretaker in the mountains of northern New Mexico and traveled around the world as a recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship; he currently tends a wild garden in Kansas, where he directs the MFA Program at Wichita State.

Nan Cohen’s books are Rope Bridge; Unfinished City, winner of the Michael Dryden Award from Gunpowder Press; and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her poems and prose have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Electric Literature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Tikkun, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is chair of English at Viewpoint School and co-directs the poetry programs of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She lives in Los Angeles.

Joanna Fuhrman, an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, is the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021). Fuhrman’s next book Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Curbstone/ Northwestern University Press in 2024.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming on the Slowdown podcast and in The Pushcart Prize anthology and Best American Poetry 2023. Last year—after publishing with them since she was a teenager, Fuhrman became a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press.

Rodger Kamenetz is a poet, author,  professor emeritus of English and Religious Studies. He is best known for The Jew in the Lotus, an international best-seller now in its 40th printing.  He’s published fifteen books of poetry and prose, among them Stalking Elijah which won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought and The History of Last Night’s Dream which was featured on Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series.  His other books of Jewish interest include Terra Infirma and Burnt Books a dual biography of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav and Franz Kafka. His recent books of poetry include  Yonder and Dream Logic. His latest book, The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022 represents a forty-six year project in Jewish poetry. Rodger founded  Natural Dreamwork  and leads an international group of practitioners.

Rodger Kamenetz’s faculty position and reading are generously sponsored by Harry Jacobs & Lauren Goodman in memory of Leo Jacobs & in honor of Bernice Jacobs.