Eli Amir was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1937, and arrived in Israel with his family in 1950. He studied Middle Eastern history and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Amir has served as adviser on Arab affairs to the Prime Minister and envoy for the Ministry of Absorption to the USA. Since 1984, he has been director-general of the youth immigration department at the Jewish Agency. Amir is well-known in Israel for his involvement with new immigrants and his activity in Palestinian-Jewish relations. His first novel, Scapegoat, has been adapted as a play and a TV series, and a film based on his second novel, Farewell, Baghdad, was released in 2014. Amir has been awarded Youth Immigration's Jubilee Prize (1983), the Jewish Literature Prize (Mexico, 1985), the Ahi Award (1994), Am Oved's Jubilee Prize (1994), the Yigal Alon Prize for Outstanding Service to Society (1997), the Book Publishers Association's Platinum Prize three times (1998; 2009; 2011) and the Prime Minister's Prize (2002). He received an Honorary Doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 2008. He is also winner of the Brenner Prize for Literature 2019 for his novel Bicycle Boy.
Rachely Dor Rappaport is an Israeli author and literary editor, born in Moshav Herut. Her first short story, “Chronograph,” was a runner-up in the 2010 Haaretz short story competition. Since then, she has published short stories and reviews in Israel’s main literary journals and has taught creative writing and creative biography at colleges, an independent book shop, and art school. Her bilingual (Hebrew/Yiddish) fiction book Language of Sin was published in 2019 and her creative biography books are published at Israel’s largest publication houses and research institutes. She has a Masters in creative writing from Ben Gurion University and is now doing her PhD in literature at Bar-Ilan University.
Glenn Gitomer earned his B.F.A. from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts and his J.D. from the Robert H. McKinney School of Law of Indiana University. For the past forty-seven years he has practiced law in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. He has chosen to write short stories over golf. He lives with his wife Jane in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
Shira Gorshman (1906-2001) was born in Krakes, Lithuania. Her childhood years were difficult, and by the age of 14 she was self-supporting, becoming involved in the labour movement and then, with her first husband, moving to Palestine. By the time she was 20 she had three daughters and was working in G'dud ha-Avodah, an idealistic group which performed heavy labour for the emerging Jewish settlement. When this group splintered, Gorshman went with the more radical branch to Crimea, with her children but without her husband. Living on a communal farm in Crimea, she came into contact with official visitors, including the artist Mendel Gorshman. They married and she and her children returned with him to Moscow. Always a storyteller, in Moscow she began to write, publishing in Soviet and Polish Yiddish periodicals and eventually producing story collections and novels. Following her husband's death, she returned to Israel in 1990, energetically producing stories and memoirs until her death in 2001, as well as revising and republishing many of her Soviet-era stories. "The Parasite" was her first published story, appearing in the 1930s.
Bari Lynn Hein’s stories are published or forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, Mslexia, Vestal Review, CALYX, Mud Season Review, decomp, Adelaide, Verdad, The Ilanot Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Sensitive Skin Magazine and elsewhere. Her prose has been awarded finalist placement in many national and international writing competitions, among them The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest and the OWT Fiction Prize. Her debut novel is on submission. Learn more at barilynnhein.com.
Jakuba Katalpa (b. 1979) is one of the Czech Republic’s leading contemporary authors. For her debut novella, Je hlína k snědku? (Is Soil To Be Eaten?), she was shortlisted for a Magnesia Litera award in the Newcomer of the Year category. Her novel Hořké moře (Bitter Sea) was shortlisted for the Jiří Orten Award. Katalpa’s novel Němci (The Germans) won the Josef Škvorecký Award and the Czech Book Award; it was also shortlisted for a Magnesia Litera in the prose category. Zuzanin dech (Zuzana’s Breath), the author’s latest novel and her most successful to date, was published in 2020. Her books have been published in seven languages, including German and Italian, and rights have been also sold to Poland, Slovakia and Serbia.
Rimma Kranet is a Russian-American fiction writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from University of California Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Construction Lit, Coal Hill Review, EcoTheo Collective, The Common Breath, Drunk Monkey, and other magazines. Her work is forthcoming in 2022 in The Short Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices. She resides in Florence, Italy and Los Angeles, California.
Deborah Kotz spent more than two decades as a health journalist where she worked on staff at the Boston Globe and US News and World Report. She currently works as a media relations director at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. She’s enrolled at the University of Baltimore MFA program on the fiction track and occasionally contributes columns on Orthodox Judaism and feminism for the JOFA blog hosted by the New York Jewish Week. She holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University in science communication.
Gabriel Lampert is a retired adjunct professor of mathematics, now residing in San Francisco. He lived and worked for 40 years in the New Mexico desert, and is hoping he has found his Promised Land. He has had about a dozen short stories and essays published in small magazines, most notably in the University of Edinburgh Informatics Department's celebration of the Alan Turing centenary. The rock mentioned in this story is quite real, and he has visited it twice. The writing on it propelled him to figure out who must have carved it and why, so this story is one suggestion not previously published.
Eric Gabriel Lehman has published novels, short stories, and essays. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Raritan, and elsewhere. He teaches at Queens College/CUNY in New York, where he lives.
B.L. Makiefsky was the winner of the 2012 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest for the short story collection Fathers and Sons. His fiction and articles have appeared in numerous publications. In addition, he has written three stage plays, one of which (a one-act) was produced. Makiefsky spent his formative years living an itinerant life that included picking cherries in the Hood River Valley, harvesting hemp in Iowa, working construction in California, as a newspaper reporter in west Michigan, and crisscrossing the country on motorcycles, hopping trains, and hitchhiking.
Shmuel Nadata wrote The Greenberg Funeral: Linked Stories while working towards his MFA in Fiction at Johns Hopkins University. The collection then sat unread for nearly twenty years until his mother-in-law suggested he submit something from it to Jewish Fiction .net. He submitted the titular story, and he is glad he did. Shmuel continues to write to this day. He is married with four children and several pets.
Danielle Resh’s poetry has been published in the Jewish Literary Journal, the Sunlight Press, Hevria Magazine, Poetica, and is forthcoming in Valiant Scribe. “Soles and Souls” is excerpted from her unpublished historical fiction manuscript, “The Miracle of Kryshenshok,” about a shtetl community in nineteenth century Poland that discovers its Torah is miraculously growing. The manuscript was the winning historical fiction manuscript of the Writers’ League of Texas’ 2020 Manuscript Contest, as well as a finalist in the science fiction/fantasy category. Danielle is currently seeking a publisher for it. You can find out more about her writing at danielleresh.com.
Mayan Rogel is an author, screenwriter, immersive storyteller, writing teacher and narrative consultant. She lives in Tel Aviv with her wife and our daughter. To date she has published five books in different genres. She lives and breathes stories, as a writer and as a reader. Surrounded by stories, she writes those which haunt her the most.
Tatia Rosenthal is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and animator. She's directed and co-written $9.99, a feature film based on Israeli writer Etgar Keret's short stories. Her second feature film collaboration, Five and a Half Love Stories, is currently being filmed in Lithuania by Director/Co-writer Tomas Vengris. Issachar is her first published story.
Yishai Sarid was born in 1965 and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is the son of senior politician and journalist Yossi Sarid. Sarid was recruited to the Israeli army in 1983 and served for five years. He studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During 1994–1997, he worked for the Government as an Assistant District Attorney in Tel Aviv, prosecuting criminal cases. Sarid has a Public Administration Master's Degree (MPA) from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1999). Alongside his legal career, Sarid writes literature, and so far, he has published six novels. His novels have been translated into ten languages and have won literary prizes.
Dorit Shiloh, after completing her PhD thesis in literature, taught at various universities in France and Israel. A writer, professional editor and translator, she specializes in quality literary translation from French into Hebrew and writes book reviews for Haaretz newspaper. Since 2017, she has been the co-founder and editor of the leading Israeli literary journal HaMussach. Her debut book, The Countdown (2020), was sponsored by the Rabinovitch Foundation and Israel's Ministry of Culture, was awarded the Goldberg Foundation Hebrew Literature Prize for a Debut Book (2021), and was chosen as an Outstanding Book of the Year 2020 by Haaretz.
Steve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as a successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He has won five Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award, and a National Jewish Book Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at Skidmore College, the majority of those years as Writer-in-Residence. He has also been a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Elan University in Tel Aviv, the Moss Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and Lecturer in Jewish Studies for the Prague Summer Seminars. Stern splits his time between Brooklyn and Balston Spa, New York. The Village Idiot (Melville House, 2022) is his most recent novel.
