2023 Inaugural Conference: Thursday Fellows & Faculty Reading

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.

Dan Bellm lives in Berkeley, California. His five books of poems include Counting (2023), Deep Well (2017), and Practice: A book of midrash (2008), winner of the 2009 California Book Award. Poems have appeared in The Best American Spiritual Writing; 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium; and many other journals and anthologies. Recent translations of poetry include Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo (2023) and Speaking in Song, by Pura López Colomé (2017). Most recently, he taught literary translation and poetry in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Heather Altfeld is a poet and essayist.  Her two books of poetry are “Post-Mortem” (Orison Books, April 2021) and “The Disappearing Theatre” (Poets at Work, 2016).  Her work is featured in the 2019 Best American Essays, Conjunctions Magazine, Orion Magazine, Aeon Magazine, Narrative Magazine, and others. She was the 2017 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award with the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at CSU Chico, and is at work on a collection of essays.

Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the ethnography Pinelandia, finalist for the Atelier award (University of California Press, 2022). Stone’s poems appear in The Atlantic, POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Nation, and The New Republic. She is an Assistant Professor in Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton. Stone has won a Pushcart, a Fulbright, and conducted fieldwork across the Middle East and the United States.

Jacqueline Osherow’s ninth collection of poems, Divine Ratios, was published by LSU Press in 2023.  She’s received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Prize.  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet and many other anthologies and journals.  She’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.