Noga Albalach was born in Petah Tikva, Israel, in 1971, and now lives in Tel Aviv. She received an MA in economics from Tel Aviv University and worked for several years as an equity analyst. In 2005, she left this field and started studying literature. She received her MA in literature from Tel Aviv University and at present she works as literary editor. Albalach has published a novel, collections of short stories and novellas as well as books for children. She has been awarded the Ministry of Culture Prize for Debut Literature (2011) and the Prime Minister's Prize (2016).
Arielle Bases is the granddaughter of German Jews who escaped to India from Nazi Germany and created a life in and around Bombay. Her novel, Forever in India, is based on their experiences. Arielle has always been interested in immigrants’ stories and how they connect with history. She majored in History at UC Berkeley and received her Juris Doctorate degree from UCLA. Arielle is an appellate attorney who specializes in immigration and indigent criminal appeals. Some of her cases have been published in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She lives in Southern California with her husband and three children.
Lili Berger (1916-1996). Born in Malken (near Bialystok), Berger was a prolific literary critic and essayist, as well as a novelist and playwright. She received a religious education, completed high school in Warsaw, studied in Brussels, and settled in Paris at the end of 1936. She taught Yiddish and contributed to important periodicals. During the Nazi occupation of France, together with her husband, Louis Gronowski, she was active in the Resistance and was involved in the rescue of Jewish children from deportation. She returned to Warsaw after the war but was forced to leave in 1968 during the great exodus which she bitterly referred to as the ‘trikener pogrom’ (the bloodless pogrom). She resumed her literary activity in Paris, living there until her death in 1995. Her articles and essays were often about writers and artists, including Franz Kafka, Janusz Korczak, Simone de Beauvoir, and Chaim Soutine — people she had known personally, who had experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, Soviet Gulag, or other ordeals in post-war Communist Poland. Her fiction depicted characters scarred by the Holocaust. Her collections include Today and Yesterday (1965), Essays and Sketches (1965), After the Flood (1967), Broken Branches (1970), In the Course of Time (1976), From Near and Far (1978), Incomplete Pages (1982), and Echoes of Distant Times.
Jonathan DeCoteau is the author of The Naked Earth, winner of a 2007 Indie Excellence Award, and named 2008 Fiction Book of the Year by The Online Journal of News and Current Affairs. His work has been published in Longshot Island Magazine, Literally Stories, Reader’s Quarterly, Farther Horizons Than These, and Far Horizons.
Susan Dickman is a writer, artist, teacher and founding member of the Jewish Artists Collective of Chicago. An Illinois Arts Council Award recipient, she has published poetry, fiction, and essays most recently in Intellectual Refuge, Best of the Best American Poetry 2013, Lilith, Zocalo Public Square, and Brain, Child. She has exhibited artwork at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning, The Evanston Art Center, The Art Center of Highland Park, The Bridgeport Arts Center, and Morpho Gallery.
Dea Hadar is an award-winning writer and journalist who lives in New York. She is the author of two critically acclaimed Hebrew books: Numi Numi, Isawiya (a collection of short stories) and Etzlenu Achshav Boker, a novel about a dysfunctional family of Israeli immigrants in Manhattan in the 1980s. In 2012, her novel was awarded the Am HaSefer translation grant by the Israeli Ministry of Culture and the Yehoshua Rabinowitz Foundation of the Arts. She worked at Haaretz newspaper for twelve years as magazine writer, TV critic, and personal columnist, with foreign assignments in Guantanamo Bay, Turkey, and other places. Her short stories have been translated and published in several Spanish anthologies and in a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew anthology (“Two”/“Shtayim”). Her non-fiction story, “Farewell, Anne Frank,” was recently published in English. She studied journalism and international relations at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Natasha Lvovich is a writer and scholar of multilingualism and creativity and literature written in non-native language. Originally from Moscow, Russia, she teaches at City University of New York and divides her loyalties between academic and creative writing. She is the author of a collection of autobiographical narratives, The Multilingual Self, and of a number of articles, essays, and innovative mixed genre pieces. Her creative nonfiction appeared in journals (Life Writing, New Writing), anthologies (Lifewriting Annual, Anthology of Imagination & Place) and literary magazines (Post Road, Nashville Review, Two Bridges, bioStories, NDQ, Epiphany, New England Review, and Hippocampus Magazine). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest-Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant FlashFiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Review and ROAR. Her non-fiction work is forthcoming in the anthology All the Women in my Family Sing. Her fiction is forthcoming in the anthology Running Wild. She is the prose editor for the literary magazine Writers Resist. She lives in the high desert of Southern California with her husband, two dogs, a goat, and five chickens.
Gali Mir-Tibon (the author) was born and raised on Kibbutz Kvutzat Shiller. She has a PhD in history from Tel Aviv University. She is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Excellence in the Humanities, a teacher trainer in the Amit schools, and a visiting scholar at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. She is also the former principal of high schools in Bat Yam and Ma'alot Tarshiha, This is her first novel.
Matt Nesvisky for 16 years was a senior editor and reporter at The Jerusalem Post. Currently he is a contributing editor for The Jerusalem Report. As a freelance writer, Matt Nesvisky has published nearly 900 articles in such publications as The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Economist, The New York Daily News and The World Journalism Review. He has reported from Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Britain, Russia, Eastern Europe, South Africa, Japan and China. Matt Nesvisky holds a doctorate in English from Carnegie-Mellon University and currently resides in Philadelphia.
Lesléa Newman is the author of 70 books for readers of all ages including the short story collection, A Letter To Harvey Milk; the poetry collection, I Carry My Mother; and the children’s books, A Sweet Passover, Here Is The World: A Year of Jewish Holidays, and Ketzel, The Cat Who Composed. Her literary awards include writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Award. From 2008 - 2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, MA. Currently she teaches at Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing program.
Rose Rappoport Moss was born in South Africa and has lived in Massachusetts since 1964. She has taught at a number of colleges and universities in Massachusetts. This story draws in part on her teaching at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and in part on a visit to Lithuania three years ago. She has published novels, stories and non-fiction and some of her work has been translated into Spanish. She is currently curious about food and memory. www.rosemosswriter.com.
Sharon Roseman lives in St. John’s, Canada where she is Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Programs) in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Memorial University. Trained as an anthropologist, she has always worked across disciplines and expressive genres, including in translation, photography, and film. Her latest non-fiction book is The Tourism Imaginary and Pilgrimages to the Edges of the World (co-edited with Nieves Herrero). Her poetry and fiction have been published in Poetica: Contemporary Jewish Writing, CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, and Found Polaroids.
Carl Schiffman is a native New Yorker and a graduate of the MFA program at Yale Drama School, where he was an Arts of the Theater Fellow. Five of his short plays were produced off-Broadway in the 70s, but no professional career resulted. He began publishing short stories in 1972. He is 82 and has been retired for many years. He made his living as a state and federal civil rights investigator, then as a writer for non-profit organizations and fund raising consulting firms, which experience prompted the Curly Hamson series. His mother's father was president of an ultra-Orthodox synagogue in Freehold, NJ; his parents were non-observant Jews with a strongly leftward political tilt. Before Yale, Schiffman was circulation manager and occasional music and movie reviewer for The Jewish Examiner, a Brooklyn weekly, and also worked in the classic Jewish Catskills as a busboy.
Brian Schwartz has published short stories and essays in Harvard Review, Blackbird, cream city review and in the anthology Inheriting the War. He is a senior lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU and has also taught at UC Irvine, San Francisco State and in Bard College's Language & Thinking Program. He lives with his wife and two daughters in New Jersey.
Bryan Schwartzman is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Jewish Exponent, Forward, Jerusalem Post, The Queens Tribune and other publications. His fiction has been published in The Schuylkill Valley Journal and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He currently works in the communications department of the Reconstructing Judaism, a nonprofit organization, where he co-hosts the podcast, #TrendingJewish. Bryan earned a master’s degree in Modern Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He previously studied journalism and English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A native New Yorker, he lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.
Yoav Shutan-Goshen was born in Israel in 1980. He received a BA in law and humanities from Tel Aviv University and completed a screenwriters program at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School. Shutan-Goshen has worked as a journalist for Yedioth Ahronoth, as well as writing a comic column for The Marker. He is now a playwright for the Gesher, Beit Lessin and Beersheba Theaters, and also wrote a drama series for Channel 2 TV. His feature film will be released in 2017. Shutan-Goshen lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, and teaches law at Sapir College. One Woman, One Time is his first novel.
Leah Silverman’s short fiction, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared under the name Leah Silverman Gales in The Carolina Quarterly, Meridian, and on Web del Sol.Her nonfiction has been published in River Teeth. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, won a writing fellowship from Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain, and received multiple grants from the Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in metropolitan Detroit, she currently lives in Durham, NC, where she is writing a memoir and making abstract art.
J.L. Wall lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is completing a Ph.D. in English and Judaic Studies and teaches writing. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he studied Classics at Northwestern University. He has studied Yiddish, published academic articles on Jewish poetry, the novels of William Faulkner, and assorted book reviews, and spends too much time worrying about the Chicago Cubs. “Blessed is the Memory” is his first published work of fiction.
