Patricia Black-Gould was born and raised in New Jersey. She has a diverse background that includes a career as a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology where she has published in the field of mental health and cultural Deafness. In the arts, she has worked as a theater director, producer, and playwright. Her plays have previously been produced in New York and New England and she now has a production scheduled in Florida, where she currently resides. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Panoply, A Literary Zine, Mused Literary Magazine, and the Pen Women Literary Journal. She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women. She is working on her first novel. In addition, she hopes to turn her story, “The Crystal Beads,” into a play.
Rob Granader, after law school, reported on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC for a number of print news outlets in the mid-1990s, publishing more than 350 articles and essays in over 50 publications. In 1998 he started MarketResearch.com, where he is currently the founder and CEO. Rob’s work has been featured in the Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine, New York Times, and Mariashriver.com. He has won writing awards from Bethesda Magazine and Writer’s Digest and attended various workshops including the Key West Literary Seminar and the Writer’s Digest Conference in Los Angeles. He has a BA in English from the University of Michigan and a JD from The George Washington University. His writing can be found at www.RobGranader.com or his blog at https://expatlondon.blogspot.com
Joan Gurfield's short story, "The Resistance," won the 2018 Short Story Award from Gival Press. She has been a professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at East Los Angeles College, the arts editor of a small newspaper, and (briefly) an incompetent waitress. Several of her stories have been published in literary journals, and a longer piece was optioned for a feature film.
Shawn C. Harris is an author from Richmond, Virginia. Before beginning her debut novel, Persephone, she wrote, developed and produced plays for New York City's indie theatre scene. A passionate advocate for improving diversity in theatre, her plays consistently featured meaty roles for women, people of color, and LGBT people. In 2010, she founded Crossroads Theatre Project to create theatrical works that challenge assumptions about stories by and about people of African descent. When she’s not toiling away on her current work in progress, Shawn is an avid moviegoer and tabletop role-playing game enthusiast.
Martin Itzkowitz works chiefly in short fiction and poetry. The latter has appeared in such publications as Moment, The Lyric, Barefoot Muse, TheHypertexts and the anthology When Memory Speaks: The Holocaust in Art. Brooklyn born and bred, a fact central to much of his writing, Martin is nevertheless a long-time resident of Philadelphia. He is Professor Emeritus at Rowan University where he taught in the Department of Writing Arts. As evidenced by the story here, Martin continues to write in retirement. He is currently engaged in revising The Days of Solomon Kahn, an annotated fictive journal purportedly kept by a Jewish immigrant to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century and translated from the Yiddish.
Emily Alice Katz’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, Lilith, storySouth, Confrontation, The South Carolina Review, and Flyway, among other publications, and has been recognized by Glimmer Train. Her short story collection, The Book of Nut and Other Stories, was designated a finalist for the 2019 Eludia Award. As vocalist for Manifesto Klezmer Band, she has set the poetry of Yiddish poet Anna Margolin to music, as well as crafted new translations of Margolin's work. She earned a PhD in modern Jewish studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2008 and is the author of Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967 (SUNY Press, 2015). She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two children. You can read more about her at https://emilyalicekatz.com/
Remy Maisel is a Jewish writer from New York currently living in London. Her bylines have appeared in Kveller, Politico, and The Huffington Post, and she is the co-author of Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from City, University of London.
Steven Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal and moved to Prince Edward Island, Canada in 2001. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. His books include the story collection Fatted Calf Blues (Turnstone Press, 2009), the novel Our Lady Of Steerage (B&B, 2015), the poetry chapbook Leonard’s Flat (Grey Borders Books, 2018) and the full-length poetry collection Swinging Between Water and Stone (Guernica Editions, 2019).
Yael Medini was born in 1930 in Israel. She served in the army during the War of Independence and for a while lived on a kibbutz. She received a B.A. from Hunter College and an M.A. from New York University. Over the years she published stories and novels for children, young adults and adults. Her novel for young adults The Boy I Did Not Know won prizes from Yad Va’shem and the Ministry of Education and Culture. She wrote the libretto for Oasis, an opera for children composed by Dr. Tsippi Fleischer, which was performed in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in Israel. She also wrote several radio dramas which were broadcast on Israeli radio. Some of her stories were published in English in the New York- based monthly Midstream and in Children of Israel, Children of Palestine published by Simon and Schuster.
Mendele Mokher Seforim (the author) (Mendele the Bookseller in Yiddish ) is the pen name of Shalom Yakov Abramowitz (1835-1917). Although known as the “grandfather of Yiddish Literature”, he is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern fiction in Hebrew as well as Yiddish. In fact, he began his career as a Hebrew writer, later writing in Yiddish as a way to reach a wider audience. In addition to stories that portrayed Jewish shtetl life with honesty and without judgment, Mendele wrote essays and drama in both Hebrew and Yiddish throughout a life spent mostly in Russia.
Levana Moshon was born in Tel Aviv, is a graduate of Bar-Ilan University in education and geography, and is a writer, journalist, teacher, and children narrator, and a resident of Givat Shmuel. She has published 40 prose books for children and youth, and 4 novels for adults: Excision (2019), The Silence of the Plants (nominated for the Sapir Prize 2015 ), Sour Love (winner of the Tchernichovsky Award), and Blue Woolen Wire. Her work has appeared in anthologies in Hebrew and Spanish. Her children’s stories were published in various children's magazines and were also read on Israeli radio, on a children’s program called One More Story and That’s all. She has won the ACUM Award twice.
Leonid Newhouse, born and raised in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in the former Soviet Union, emigrated to the United States in 1977. He received the 1998-99 Writing Fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for his manuscript, The Fairytale House: Growing Up as a Jew in Soviet Russia. A story from that collection, “The Camp,” was subsequently published in Maggid: A Journal of Jewish Literature. “The House of Cards” is the first story in his new collection, Out of Russia: From Mama’s Boy to Refusenik. A clinical social worker by day, he lives in Jamaica Plain, MA.
Tal Nitzan (the author) is an award winning poet, editor and a major translator of Hispanic literature. She has published seven poetry collections, one novel, and six children’s books. Her second novel is due out shortly. Among her awards are the Israeli Culture Minister's Prize for beginning poets and for a debut book, the Prime Minister’s Prize for writers, the Publishers’ Association Poetry Award, the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University Prizes for Poetry. A dozen selections of her poetry were published in several languages. An ardent peace activist, Tal has edited the anthology With an Iron pen: Hebrew poetry protesting the occupation, subsequently published in France and the U.S. Tal has translated circa eighty works in poetry and prose, mainly from Spanish, and has adapted a Hebrew version of Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s plays for youth. For her translations, she has won numerous awards, among them the Culture Minister Creation Prize for translators (twice) and an honorary medal from Chile’s president for her translation of Pablo Neruda. Tal is a founding editor at The Garage, the online literary magazine of the National Library of Israel.
Nessa Rapoport was born in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of a novel, Preparing for Sabbath, and a collection of prose poems, A Woman's Book of Grieving. Her memoir of family and place, House on the River: A Summer Journey, was awarded a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her new novel, Evening, is being published by Counterpoint on September 1, 2020. Her story, "Saving Mr. Mackenzie," appeared in Issue 2 of Jewish Fiction.net. Her meditations are included in Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn. With Ted Solotaroff, she edited The Schocken Book of Contemporary Jewish Fiction. She speaks frequently about Jewish culture and imagination.
Nava Semel (1954-2017) was born in Tel Aviv. She had an MA in art history from Tel Aviv University and worked as a journalist, art critic and TV, radio and recording producer. Semel published novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children's books and a number of TV scripts. Many of her stories have been adapted for radio, film, TV and the stage in Israel, Europe and the USA. Her novel, And the Rat Laughed, has been made into an opera; it is also being made into a feature film, directed by David Fisher. Her children's book, The Girl in the Gong, was performed on stage as a very successful musical in a co-production between Beit Lessin Theater and the Holon Mediatheque in 2012. Semel was a member of the Massua Institute of Holocaust Studies and was on the board of governors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. Semel received several literary prizes, including the American National Jewish Book Award for Children's Literature (1990), the Women Writers of the Mediterranean Award (1994), the Prime Minister's Prize (1996), the Austrian Best Radio Drama Award (1996), the Rosenblum Prize for Stage Arts (2005), and Tel Aviv's Literary Woman of the Year (2007). Most recently, her y/a book, Love for Beginners, received the One of the Best Seven Prize awarded by Radio Germany (2010) as well as the Educators and Scientists Association Award (Germany, 2010).
Gábor T. Szántó, a Hungarian novelist, essayist and poet, is the editor-in-chief of the Jewish monthly Szombat. His interests include researching and teaching Modern Jewish Literature. He has published novels, collections of short stories and a book of poetry, many of which have reached international audiences in translation. A story from 1945 és más történetek, the basis for the multiple award winning feature film, 1945, has been translated into many languages; The First Christmas is from this volume. His most recent novel is Europa szimfónia (Europe Symphony, 2019) with movie rights already reserved by M&M Films.
