David Bezmozgis moved from Latvia to Canada at the age of six. He studied English literature at McGill University and fine arts at the Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Natasha and Other Stories, his debut collection, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region), the Canadian Jewish Book Award, and the Toronto Book Award; was a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads; and is being made into a feature film. His first novel, The Free World, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award, and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Trillium Book Award. In 2010, Bezmozgis was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” writers. He lives in Toronto.
Don Cohen has had short fiction published in The South Carolina Review and The Fiddlehead. He is the recipient of a Massachusetts Artists Foundation playwriting fellowship. He is co-author (with Laurence Prusak) of In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Harvard Business School Press). In addition to writing fiction and drama, he is managing editor of NASA's ASK Magazine.
Norman Danzig recently retired after 27 years as a union representative. His last job was negotiating and enforcing contracts for school employees in New Jersey. Now in addition to enjoying the next phase of his life, he will have time to pick up his youngest granddaughter from school. He and his wife, Gail, have three daughters and three granddaughters in their blended family. He has published three other stories in ezines and is currently working on a novella about a young woman leaving her home in Lithuania in 1935 to come to America while encountering different forces.
Nomi Eve is the author of Henna House and The Family Orchard, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award.
She has an MFA in fiction writing from Brown University and has worked as a freelance book reviewer for The Village Voice and New York Newsday. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Voice Literary Supplement, Conjunctions, and The International Quarterly. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.
Gloria Garfunkel is the daughter of two Auschwitz survivors. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard University. She has been a psychotherapist for over 25 years. She writes short fiction and has recently published over 50 stories.
Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile is the first novel about anti-Israelism on campus. It has received enthusiastic reviews, as well as praise from Thane Rosenbaum, Steve Stern, Phyllis Chesler, Irwin Cotler, Nava Semel, Naim Kattan, Alice Shalvi, and Ann Birstein. Dr. Gold’s first book, Marrow and Other Stories, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award. In addition, Gold is the creator and editor of Jewish Fiction .net, the Writer-in-Residence and an Associate Scholar at CSWE / OISE / University of Toronto, a blogger for “The Jewish Thinker” at Haaretz, the organizer of the Wonderful Women Writers Series, and a community activist. For more details, please visit her website.
Emmanuel Kattan, born in Montreal, is the author of three novels, Nous seuls, Les Lignes de désir and Le Portrait de la reine. He studied in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and is a graduate of the University of Montreal and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Emmanuel currently heads the British Council’s New York Office and was previously Head of Communications at the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
April Laufer is a freelance writer. She attended the University of Toronto and Hebrew University and completed a Masters Degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She has published in a number of journals and has been Contributing Editor for the Jewish Review. April’s short stories have been published in Canadian Woman Studies, Facts and Arguments page of the Globe and Mail and the Literary Section of the Canadian Jewish News.
Joan Leegant is the author of a novel, Wherever You Go, named by the Union for Reform Judaism as one of its ‘Significant Jewish Books’, and a story collection, An Hour in Paradise, winner of the PEN/New England Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. From 2007 to 2013, Joan was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University where she taught in the master’s program in creative writing. While in Israel, she also lectured on American literature and culture under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. Formerly an attorney, Joan began writing fiction at age forty. Currently she lives in Seattle where she is the writer-in-residence at Hugo House.
Dr. Susan Lowinger is a clinical child psychologist who works with developmentally-disabled children and their families. Dr. Lowinger is the editor of three non-fiction books about the diagnosis and treatment of autistic children. She grew up in New York City, later moving to Israel, where she enjoys exploring the ancient land with her husband and children. Presently, she is working on a collection of fiction stories about the meaningful and often unusual experience of life in Israel.
Eshkol Nevo was born in Jerusalem in 1971. He studied copywriting at the Tirza Granot School and psychology at Tel Aviv University. Today, Nevo owns and co-manages the largest private creative writing school in Israel and is considered the “godfather” of many upcoming young Israeli writers. He has published novels, short stories and nonfiction. His novels have all been top bestsellers. Nevo, whose novels are very successful abroad, has received the Book Publishers Association's Gold and Platinum Prizes (2005; 2006; 2008; 2011), the FFI-Raymond Wallier Prize (Paris, 2008), the ADEI-WIZO Prize (Italy, 2011) and the Steimatzky Prize twice, for Neuland (2012) and for The Lost Solos (2014). Homesick was a finalist for the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (UK, 2009), and World Cup Wishes was a finalist for the Kritikerpreis der Jury der Jungen Kritiker (Austria, 2011).
Margueya Novick has an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College where she completed a collection of short stories about the Orthodox Jewish community. She has taught Creative Writing to high school and college aged students for the last six years. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines.
Ofir Oz is an author and a blogger from Israel. He wrote his first story in 1983 when he was six years old, in Hebrew uppercase letters he had recently learned in school. His novel, The First Name, met with critical acclaim and popular success. The First Name is told as a series of short stories, which interconnect and intertwine to become a picaresque novel. The first story, “Criminal,” won the Steimatzky award for Best Short Story of the Year, and is now available on Amazon. “Oscar” is the second story in this book.
Rena Rossner is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at The Johns Hopkins University, Trinity College Dublin and McGill University. She works as a Foreign Rights and Literary Agent at The Deborah Harris Agency in Jerusalem. Her poetry and short fiction has been published or is forthcoming from The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Rampallian, Thrice Fiction, Poetica Magazine, MiPoesias, The 22 Magazine, Exterminating Angel Press and The Prague Revue, among others. Her cookbook, Eating the Bible, was recently published by Skyhorse Publishing. Her first novel is out on submission.
Zachary C. Solomon is a Miami-born, Brooklyn-based writer, and current Fiction MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. You can find him at zacharycsolomon.wordpress.com or on Twitter @z_solomon.
Steve Stern is the author of a number of novels and story collections, including most recently The Frozen Rabbi and The Book of Mischief. He's the recipient of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American fiction and the National Jewish Book Award, and has received fellowships from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations. His stories have been included in the Pushcart and O.Henry Prize anthologies, and three of his books were cited as New York Times Notables. He's a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College.
Bill Teitelbaum's plays and short fiction have appeared in journals such as Bayou, Oregon Literary Review, Montreal Review, and Rhino, in anthologies such as Western Michigan University’s Art of the One-Act, and most recently in 2 Bridges Review, Audition Art, Milo Review, and Great Weather for Media’s 2014 anthology. His current projects include a cycle of short plays called Kings, about the imperial legacies of Saul, David and Solomon, and a collection of short stories called Are You Seeing Anyone?
Ross Ufberg is a writer, translator and PhD Candidate in the Slavic Department at Columbia University. His work has appeared in World Literature in Translation, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Forward, Heeb, and elsewhere. Beautiful Twentysomethings, Ufberg’s translation of the memoir of Polish rebel icon Marek Hlakso, was published in Fall 2013 (Northern Illinois University Press) and The Good Life Elsewhere, a translation of the novel by Moldovan author Vladimir Lorchenkov, is forthcoming from New Vessel Press, a publishing house specializing in literature in translation, of which Ufberg is cofounder.
Sarit Yishai-Levi, a journalist and author, was born in Jerusalem in 1947 to a Sephardic family that has lived in the city for seven generations. She studied at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio and later at Tel Aviv University. Before turning to journalism, Yishai-Levi acted in theater and film for several years. Later, she was a correspondent for various Israeli newspapers and magazines, including At, Monitin, HaOlam HaZeh and Hadashot, as well as hosting Hebrew TV and radio programs in Los Angeles. At present, she is a senior correspondent for Olam Ha’Isha magazine and hosts TV shows on tourism and lifestyle. Yishai-Levi has published four non-fiction books. For her first novel, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a bestseller in Israel, she has received the Publishers Association's Gold and Platinum Prizes (2014) and the Steimatzky Prize for best-selling book of the year (2014).
