2023 Inaugural Conference: Discussion Panel: Introduction to a Jewish Poet Through the Lens of a Single Poem

Each panelist will speak about a different Jewish poet who has influenced them through the lens of one of that poet’s poems.

Panelists:
Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator. She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as a Fulbright Scholar to Italy, the president of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs and the director of The Poetry Society of America. Her books of poetry are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl,  Passeggiate and Thorny.

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.

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of two books of poetry: The Wug Test (Ecco) and Awayward (BOA). She co-translated The Acrobat by Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin with Faith Jones and Sam Solomon. She also co-translated Empty Chairs by Chinese poet Liu Xia. She is the Publisher and Editor of Circumference Books, a press for poetry in translation. Kronovet has lived in Beijing, Berlin, Curaçao, Guangzhou, New York, and St. Louis.

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.

Yehoshua November is the author of two poetry collections, God’s Optimism (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Two Worlds Exist (a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize). His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Sun, VQR, and on National Public Radio, Poetry Unbound, and A Life of Greatness.  November teaches writing at Rutgers University and Touro University.