Ruth Abraham is a practicing art therapist. She is the author of When Words Have Lost Their Meaning: Alzheimer’s Patients Communicate through Art (Greenwood Publications, 2005). She is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Bar-Ilan. Her fiction has appeared in the Journal of Geriatrics Society, the Ilanot Review, Linnets Wings, and Tel Aviv Short Stories. Her story “Preparations” was shortlisted in a Glimmer Train Short Story competition. She lives in Israel and is currently working on a novel.
Jonathan Ames is the author of nine books including The Extra Man, I Love You More Than You Know and the graphic novel The Alcoholic. He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, and has fought in two amateur boxing matches as "The Herring Wonder". He lives in New York.
Shmuel (Samuel) Leib Blank (1891-1962) (the author) was born in the Ukraine and died in Philadelphia, where he taught in various Hebrew schools and at Dropsie. Blank was a prolific author of Hebrew prose fiction, short-stories and novels, focusing particularly on the Jewish agricultural experience in Bessarabia and the encounters of Jews and non-Jews with America. Though some of his fiction is marked by strong romantic tendencies, he paints life in America in a stark and pessimistic light. Blank’s focus is on human nature, its tender and tempestuous as well as violent sides. As noted by Hayim Leaf, the lives of his short story protagonists are ruled by Fate which leads them to tragic consequences. Death lurks by these individuals at their moments of imagined happiness.
Wendy Brandmark is a fiction writer, reviewer and lecturer. Her latest novel, The Stray American, published by Holland Park Press, was longlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her previous novel, The Angry Gods, was published in the UK and the US. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Stand Magazine and The Warwick Review. She was recently shortlisted for the Royal Academy and Pin Drop short story prize. A collection of her short stories will be published in spring 2016. She has been a recipient of an Arts Council grant towards the writing of short stories. She has had writing residencies in the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland.She has reviewed fiction for The Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Review and The Independent. She teaches in the Oxford MSt in Creative Writing and at the City Lit.
Susan M. Breall is a judge in the Superior Court for the City and County of San Francisco. Currently, she presides over a juvenile delinquency department. Prior to her appointment to the bench in 2001, she was Chief of the Criminal Division of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office for all crimes of violence against women, children, the elderly and intimate partners. Judge Breall has participated in the Book Passage Mystery Writer Conference for the past two years as faculty, where she lends her expertise to crime fiction writers. She is currently writing a crime fiction novel about a San Francisco homicide. In 1997 she traveled to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina where she conducted domestic violence trainings for the Federation of Bosnian Judges on police investigations, interview techniques and evidence gathering for domestic violence cases.
Gina (Eugenia) Budman emigrated to Denver, Colorado from Belarus at the age of 22. When she arrived in the United States, Gina didn't know a word of English, and had very little understanding of the free world. The year was 1980, the Cold War was in full swing, and the average mid-westerner has never met a Jew from the Soviet Union. Budman lives now in a suburb of San Francisco with her family, and is a successful biotechnology professional. Gina began writing at the age of 53. She had a weekly column in a local newspaper; her essay was included in HIAS’ “My Story” collection, and she is a three-time winner of the yearly San Mateo Literary Arts contest.
Elizabeth Edelglass’s short stories have been published in Lilith (Short Story Contest winner),Michigan Quarterly Review (winner of the Lawrence Foundation Prize), In The Grove (William Saroyan Centennial Prize winner), American Literary Review, Passages North, New Haven Review, Blue Lyra Review, The Ilanot Review, and more. She has won a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fellowship and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “A New Year” is part of her novel in progress.
Rivkie Fried was born in Israel, raised in Tel Aviv and New York, and has lived n England for many years. As a journalist she covered the Middle East for Reuters News Agency and for radio, both in occupied Syria and Lebanon. On moving to London she worked at the BBC World Service for several years, as well as contributing as a freelancer to British newspapers. She has published several short stories, as well as poetry. She is now working on a novel, The Wrong Sea. It is set in Britain and Israel at the end of the 1990s.
Stephanie Friedman’s story "Exposure" (originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review52:1) was listed among the "Notables" for the year in the 2014 volume of Best American Short Stories. Her work has also appeared online at Hunger Mountain, Literary Mama, Blood Orange Review, and in RiverTeeth's "Beautiful Things" series, and is forthcoming in The Portland Review.. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.
Yitzhak Gormezano Goren was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1941 and immigrated to Israel as a child. A playwright and a novelist, Gormezano Goren has an MFA in theater directing from Brooklyn College. He cofounded the Kedem Stage Theater in Tel Aviv in 1982 and directed it for 30 years. Gormezano Goren is a winner of the Ramat Gan Prize for Literature and received the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature in 2001.
Grigory Kanovich was born in Kaunas (Kovno) Lithuania in 1929. He grew up with a command of Yiddish and a deep familiarity with traditional Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. In the postwar period he wrote mainly in Lithuanian and Russian, often dramatizing the Lithuanian Jewish experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a leading Jewish activist in Lithuania. He made aliya in 1993 and has continued his creative career in Israel. Kanovich has written in a number of genres, achieving international fame, marked popularly by huge print runs of up to one million copies, and critically by scholarly recognition of his impressive talent. Mr. Kanovich has won numerous awards. He was shortlisted three times for the Russian Booker Prize, including for his Holocaust novel, Charmed by the Devil, and has received prestigious prizes in Russia, Lithuania, and Israel: National Prize of Literature of Lithuania (1989) for his trilogy,Candles in the Wind, Prize of the Lithuanian Government for Literary and Cultural Achievements (2010), and the Israeli prize in the name of Yuri Shtern for a lifetime of literary achievement. Kanovich's The Park of the Jews was voted best Russian-language Israeli novel in 2007. His works combine the ethnic with the ethical. More information about the author at: www.gkanovich.com.
S. Frederic Liss, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has published, or has forthcoming, 38 short stories and has received The Florida Review Editor’s Award for Fiction; James Still Prize for Short Fiction sponsored by Wind; Midnight Sun Award for Fiction sponsored by Permafrost; Third prize in the Arthur Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction; Finalist for the Raymond Carver Award for Short Fiction sponsored by Carve Magazine; and Honorable Mention in the New Letters Literary Award for Fiction and the Glimmer Train June, 2014 Fiction Open. Liss has also published in theSaturday Evening Post, The South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, Dogwood, The Worcester Review, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. Liss was the recipient of a Grant-in-Aid in Literature from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Boston, MA where he leads a workshop in writing fiction.
Judith Margolis is an Israel-based American artist, book designer and writer. She is the Art Editor of Nashim, Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues. Her collages and artists’ books, combining images with text, have been published in books and magazines including ARTweek, Parabola, Sh’ma, Architectural Worlds, and CROSSCurrents. Her book Countdown to Perfection: Meditations on the Sefirot (www.brightideabooks.com) is in special collections, including at Yale and the New York Public Library. Her chapter about creative response to infirmity appears in Judaism and Health (Jewish Lights 2013). Current projects include Gazetteer (with essayist C.S. Giscombe); Lift Blade Plow (with anthropologist Mary Ann O’Donnell); and Women of the Book. Her work is archived at www.judithmargolis.com.
Argentine writer María Gabriela Mizraje, a graduate with honors from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, is a literary critic and philologist, and presently a professor and researcher with the Institute of Parliamentary Training for the Congress of the Argentine Nation. Among her books and critical editions are Argentinas de Rosas a Perón; Nora Lange. Infancia y sueños de walkiria; Mariquita Sánchez: Intimidad y política; Eduarda Mansilla: Pablo o la vida en las Pampas; Lorenzo Stanchina: Tanka Charowa, etc. She was director of the academic journalSambatión: Estudios judíos desde Latinoamérica, she’s a member of the International Editorial Board of Noaj. Literary Review (a Jerusalem-based journal in Spanish and Portuguese), and her honors include the 2010 Gold Medal Argentina from the American Biographical Institute. She is an essayist, poet and storyteller. Her fiction in English translation has previously appeared in The Antigonish Review.
Scott Nadelson is the author of three story collections, most recently Aftermath (2011), and a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress (2013). Winner of an Oregon Book Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, he teaches at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. His episodic novel, Between You and Me, which includes “Grow or Sell,” is forthcoming from Engine Books in November 2015.
Frederick Nenner, a social worker and bioethicist, lives and works in New York City, where he is in private practice and the medical ethicist at NYU Lutheran Medical Center. A writer of narrative medicine, he is widely published in medical journals. This is his first published work of fiction.
Charles Norman is a former Methodist minister who converted to Judaism at the age of 50. “There is a legend,” he says, “that sometimes a Jewish child is born into a Gentile family. There is no other explanation for me; I have always been Jewish, and only discovered that in my late 40s.” And just in time; at 59, he met Lynell, the love of his life. They married a year later. Today he works as a teacher, a caregiver, a narrator of audiobooks, and of course an aspiring writer. He plans to write a sequel to “The Shamash.”
Robert Sachs is a writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. He earned an M.F.A. in Writing from Spalding University (2009). He serves on the board of Louisville Literary Arts and has been a board member of Sarabande Books, a not-for-profit book publisher. His short stories have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in Mobius, the Journal of Social Change, The Front Porch Review, Boundoff, The Writing Disorder, Red Fez, The Blue Lake Review, Northern Liberties Review, Black Heart Magazine, Literary LEO, Lowestoft Chronicle, Diverse Voices Quarterlyand The 10th Annual Writer's Digest Short Short Story Collection. His story “Blue Room With Woman,” was an honorable mention finalist in the Glimmer Train November 2009 Short Story Award for New Writers. He was a semi-finalist in the Nineteenth Consecutive New Millennium Writing Competition.
Augusto Segre (the author) was born in the small northern Italian city of Casale Monferrato in 1915. He left for Rome in 1933 to study law at the university and Judaism at the rabbinical college. During World War Two he fought as a partisan in northern Italy. After the war, Segre became an educator, writer, translator, editor, and cultural leader, publishing educational books on the Jewish festivals and commentaries on the Torah. He taught at the Italian Rabbinical College and the Lateran Pontifical University, the first Jew to occupy a chair at this Catholic university. Augusto Segre retired to Jerusalem in 1978, publishing his memoir, Memories of Jewish Life, in 1979. “Purchase of Goods of Dubious Origin” appeared in his final work, Stories of Jewish Life, in 1986, the year of his death.
Ayelet Shamir was born in Israel in 1964 and grew up in various parts of the country as well as in Africa. She received her Ph.D in Hebrew literature from the University of Haifa. She is Chair of the Department of Literature and Creative Arts in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Oranim College, Israel. Shamir has published fiction and non-fiction. She was awarded the Wienner Prize for a debut novel (2007), the Prime Minister's Prize (2009) and the Ramat Gan Prize for The Bed You Make (2014).
Born in 1946 in Budapest, award-winning dramatist, novelist, and translator György Spiró has earned a reputation as one of postwar Hungary’s most prominent and prolific literary figures. He teaches at ELTE University of Budapest, where he specializes in Slavic literatures.
H. William Taeusch grew up in Wooster, Ohio. He received a with a BA in English from Harvard, an MD from Case Western Reserve, and an MA from the Shaindy Rudoff Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He has worked as a neonatologist and lung researcher for over thirty years. His stories have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthology, Israel Short Stories. Taeusch lives in Oakland California, and Jerusalem where he is working on his first novel.
Joshua Van De Riet is a recently minted attorney. He lives with his wife and two children in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The Choice” is his first published work of fiction and he hopes to continue writing about Jewish society and religion.
Yona Zeldis McDonough was born in Hadera, Israel and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She was educated at Vassar College and Columbia University, and is the author of six novels, with a seventh, The House on Primrose Pond, due out from New American Library in February, 2016. In addition, she is the award-winning author of twenty-six books for children and has edited two essay collections. Her work has appeared in many literary and national publications, and she is the Fiction Editor of Lilith Magazine. “The Fig Tree” is one of a collection of inter-related stories, several of which are set in Israel.
