Beth Adelman lives in New York City, where she works as a university research administrator. She has won two awards for fiction from the Bronx Council on the Arts and has published short stories online and in print at Bodega, WORK, Woven Tale Press, and the Jewish Literary Journal. A novel excerpt was published in Brilliant Corners, a print journal of jazz and literature. She is working on a novel about three people in a real estate kickback scheme in New York during the 1970s.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist, and the author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His recent national bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour as well as the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and the Hamilton Literary Award. It was also a finalist for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems was also recently published to much acclaim. A PhD in music composition, Barwin has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities. His prose and poetry has been published in hundreds of magazine and journals internationally--from Reader's Digest to Granta and the Walrus. Born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashkenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Sagit Emet is an Israeli author, playwright, and writing workshop facilitator. Winner of the Zeev Prize and the Leah Goldberg Prize for children’s literature for her novel Gaya’s Dawn (Keter, 1999). Emet is also the author of the adult novel Days to See (Yediot Books), winner of the Golden Book award for 2017. Her short story "Two" was selected as one of the finalists in the Boston Review’s literature Allies contest in 2019.
Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, and memoir. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize nomination for creative nonfiction, the Walter Sullivan prize in fiction, and an Editors’ Choice selection by Historical Novel Review. Her novels are On the Shore, Tazia and Gemma, and A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. Her stories and nonfiction appear in Sewanee Review, PRISM International, Ascent, The Long Story, Saranac Review, The Madison Review, The Minnesota Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Orca, Earth’s Daughters, Ponder Review, Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, CultureCult Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow her at https://www.asewovenwords.com or https://www.facebook.com/asewovenwords/.
Sharon Forman is a Reform rabbi and Little League mom. She has served as the director of the religious school at Manhattan’s Temple Shaaray Tefila and has taught students at Westchester Reform Temple for the past 15 years. The author of Honest Answers to Your Child’s Jewish Questions, she most recently published The Baseball Haggadah: A Festival of Freedom and Springtime in 15 Innings. Her essays on parenting, growing up in the South, and liberal Judaism have appeared in numerous publications. She holds degrees from Yale University, Columbia Teachers College, and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She and her family reside in Westchester, New York.
Bethanie Gorny is from New Jersey. She is a retired professor of special education, now a fulltime writer in Florida. Her essays have appeared in The Jewish Literary Journal, Atlantic City Press, The Jewish News of South Jersey, The Phoenix Jewish Journal, The Sun Sentinel, Florida Writer Magazine, Together Magazine, and others. She won first prize in the 2019 Royal Palm Literary Competition for short memoir. Her novella Fridays with Eva has been published. She is active in organizations that serve Holocaust survivors. She and her husband started a fund for Holocaust Survivors overseen by the Jewish Family Services organization.
Anna Gotlieb retired a year ago from a lengthy career as head of public relations for an agency in Rockland County, New York, and editor of the magazine published by that agency. Prior to that career, she was a weekly columnist for a daily paper for a decade. During the first five years, her column was entitled The Single Parent. Following her second marriage, the column was called Second Thoughts. She is the author of three books: Between the Lines, In Other Words, and Full Circle. The first two books are collections of vignettes, the third is a novel. Anna is a wife, a mother and a grandmother.
Robert Hersowitz is a semi-retired management consultant and freelance writer. Born and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa, Robert immigrated to London in 1971 where he trained as a copy writer. He later set up his own business as a management consultant specializing in international management development. In 2014 Robert and his American wife, Annie, moved to Israel where they settled in Jerusalem. There, his neighbour, veteran writer and journalist David Geffen, encouraged him to submit articles to the Jerusalem Post. He soon became a regular contributor to the newspaper’s weekend magazine. He is now a permanent contributor to the Jerusalem Report, a sister publication of the Jerusalem Post.
Nora Houri-Haim (the author) was born in 1953 in the “new, old” city of Tel Aviv, to parents who’d made aliyah from Iraq. She spent her childhood surrounded by her huge extended family and grew up on the knees of her aunts and uncles, listening to stories from the “old country.” These stories were in sharp contrast to the reality around Nora. In the fledgling state of Israel, anything foreign, and especially anything connected to the Arab world, was frowned upon. This dissonance defined Nora’s childhood and inspired her writing as an adult. She finished her schooling in Tel Aviv, and then served in the Israeli military as an educational adviser. After completing her BA, Nora got married, had four kids and spent eight years teaching 6-8th graders. Nora completed her MA, with honors in Literature and Creative Writing from Ben Gurion University in the Negev. While there, she began writing her first novel, Cover me with my Izar, which includes the short story “Serah”. The novel was nominated by her publisher for the Sapir Prize for debut novels and was praised by the National Library during the year it was published.
Miriam Kresh writes about day-to-day Israeli life, culinary culture, and the ecology in the Middle East. She has lived in the United States, Brazil, and Venezuela and currently lives in Israel. Miriam speaks four languages and sometimes finds herself explaining something in all four at once. You can reach Miriam at [email protected].
Diane Lederman lives in bucolic Hadley, Massachusetts with her partner, Donna Cohn, Steinbeck their dog, and Houdini and Babu, their cats. She has been writing fiction for three decades and was a reporter for forty plus years before “retiring” into fiction writing full time. She has taken more than a dozen workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Muse at Grub Street in Boston. Lately, she has been chronicling the time of the coronavirus by making photographs. This is her first published fiction and is part of a novel called Color of Stars.
Rachel Luria (the author) (1882-1927) was a Yiddish short story writer and a member of the staff of the Jewish Morning Journal. Born in Worzhan, Lithuania, she came to the United States at the age of twelve. She worked in clothing shops and as a nurse, in addition to her writing. Luria has received very little critical attention, though Yiddish literature scholar Mikhail Krutikov has called her “one of the most original (and completely forgotten)” New York Yiddish writers.
Mira Magen was born in Kfar Saba, Israel, in 1950 to an Orthodox family. She studied psychology and sociology before turning to nursing. She worked as a nurse at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and started publishing short stories in the early 1990s. Magen has published a number of bestselling novels and a book of short stories. She has been awarded the Olschwung Foundation Award (1988), the Prime Minister's Prize (2005) and the Book Publishers Association's Gold Book Prize five times (2001; 2004; 2005; 2011; 2012).
Amanda Miller is a New York-based writer, actor, and Jewish educator. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Freerange Nonfiction, Cratelit, So Long: Short Memoirs of Loss and Remembrance, and more. In 2013 her memoir, One Breath, Then Another, was published on Lucid River Press. Amanda has performed her solo plays The Jew in the Ashram and How To Suffer Better nationally and internationally at a variety of venues including the Edinburgh and Edmonton Fringes and Brandeis Collegiate Institute. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and a BFA in Acting from NYU. www.thejewintheashram.com
Henry Alan Paper's stories have been published in The Sun, New Phase, Scottish Life, and Portland Monthly Magazine, Kerem, Response, Jewish Currents, and Webdelsol. He often reads his stories in New Haven and has been featured numerous times on Connecticut Public Radio. He lives in Hamden, CT, with his wife and two daughters – by far the best Papers he's produced.
Leonid Pekarovsky (the author), born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1947, is a writer, journalist and art critic. Pekarovsky served in the Red Army before studying art theory and history at the Fine Arts Institute in Kiev. He worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture for many years, where he organized art exhibitions both in the USSR and worldwide. His essays on art theory and history have been published in professional journals. After he immigrated to Israel in 1991, he worked as a gardener and a printer and, in 1995, became a security guard until he recently retired to focus on his writing. His stories and novellas have been printed in the Russian press as well as in the Haaretz Culture and Literature Supplement. His first book, Broom and Other Stories, was published in 2012. His second book, A Parabola of Success, was published in 2015. His third short story collection, Ten Agorot, published in 2018, was shortlisted for the prestigious Israeli Sapir Prize.
Maureen Sherbondy’s most recent poetry book is Dancing with Dali. Her first YA novel, Lucky Brilliant, was published in March, 2020. Her work has appeared in European Judaism, Litro, The Stone Canoe, and many other journals. She teaches English at Alamance Community College in North Carolina. Maureen lives in Durham, North Carolina. Website: www.maureensherbondy.com
Vered Singer (the author) is an Israeli writer and editor. She was born in 1969 in Petach Tikva, and currently resides in Tel Aviv. In the army she served as a military reporter for the newspaper Bamchane. For a decade she held a variety of editing and writing roles in the print press. She studied language editing at Beit Berl College and is currently an independent literary and linguistic editor. Her stories have been published in Israeli newspapers and magazines such as Haaretz, Iton 77, Mozenayim, and Maaboret – Short Story Project. Her debut novel, Bound, was published in November 2018 by Kinneret-Zmora-Dvir publishing house. These days she is writing her second novel.
Ezra Solway writes in Philadelphia where he's an MFA candidate in fiction at Temple University. After high school, he spent a year of service in Akko, Israel teaching English at an after school program. He started writing in college, as a means to cope with the world. He subscribes to the importance of failure and the process of honest discovery. When the sun is out he enjoys hiking and playing tennis. His work has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Eunoia Review and Jersey Devil Press. His website: www.ezrasolway.com
Carolyn Ivy Stein is a writer and editor living in Memphis, Tennessee. She has received several Honorable Mentions from the Writers of the Future contest for science fiction and fantasy stories written in the last year and a half. She has contributed articles to The Sea in World History book set, Atlas Obscura website, and other publications. She writes romance, historical, fantasy, and science fiction as well as non-fiction and gaming supplements. She has a soon to be published collection of Norse fantasy short stories, Lightning Scarred and Other Stories. Her current work in progress is a maritime adventure novel set on the Mediterranean and in the Jewish sector of 38 CE Alexandria.
Jonathan Stone has published nine mystery and suspense novels, including Die Next, Days of Night, The Teller, Parting Shot, and the bestseller Moving Day. His short stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2016, New Haven Noir, and several Mystery Writers of America annual anthologies. Three of his books are currently optioned to Hollywood, and Moving Day is set up as a film at Lionsgate Entertainment. "Welcome to Otisville" is the opening chapter of a recently completed novel The Prison Minyan. Learn more at jonathanstonebooks.com.
Jeffrey Wolf was a finalist for the 2020 Third Coast Fiction Prize. He has an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, where he was also the recipient of a Graduate Fellowship. He currently lives in Chicago, where he teaches English at Columbia College.
Merav Zaks-Portal is a writer of poetry and prose. Her first novel, Horizon of Angels, was published by Yedioth Ahronoth Books in 2016. Many of her short stories and poems have been published in leading literary magazines in Israel. Zaks-Portal is a literary translator, English to Hebrew. Born and bred in one of the biggest kibbutzim in Israel, she currently lives in a town near Tel Aviv with her partner and three children.
