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Poetry

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Jessica Jacobs Headshot Cropped

7 Questions For Poet Jessica Jacobs

Sarah Biskowitz

JWA chats with Jessica Jacobs, poet and founder and executive director of the organization Yetzirah: A Home for Jewish Poetry. 

Topics: Poetry
Collage of Jewish Women Who Died in 2023

Jewish Women Whose Memories I’m Carrying into 2024

Judith Rosenbaum

The year 2023 brought the deaths of several powerful and influential Jewish women, whose insights and voices changed the world and are all the more painful to lose in this difficult time. 

Mónica Gomery Headshot Cropped

Q & A with Poet and Rabbi Mónica Gomery

Sarah Groustra

JWA chats with poet and rabbi Mónica Gomery about her newest poetry collection, Might Kindred

Jean Trounstine

Project
Women Who Dared

Judith Rosenbaum interviewed Jean Trounstine on July 21, 2000, in Lowell, Massachusetts for the Women Who Dared Oral History Project. Trounstine details her Jewish background in Cincinnati, how it shaped her political lens, and her prison reform work, including theater productions with incarcerated women.

Anna Ziegler Headshot

7 Questions For Anna Ziegler

Sarah Groustra

JWA talks to playwright Anna Ziegler. 

Topics: Theater, Poetry, Plays

Judith Chalmer

Project
DAVAR: Vermont Jewish Women's History Project

Sandra Stillman Gartner and Ann Buffum interviewed Judith Chalmer in Winooski, Vermont, on November 3 and December 8, 2005, as part of DAVAR’s oral history project. Chalmer discusses her family's history, her creative path as a writer, and her reflections on her Jewish identity and the role of women in Judaism, inspired by her father's experiences during the Holocaust and her efforts to honor those who helped her family.

Merle Feld

Project
Women Who Dared

Judith Rosenbaum interviewed Merle Feld on July 19, 2000, in Northampton, Massachusetts, as part of the Women Who Dared Oral History Project. Feld recounts her upbringing in Brooklyn, her involvement in the Jewish community, her work in facilitating Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and the profound impact of her activism on her life and career as a writer and public figure.

A group of people in three rows in front of a bookstore.

Interview with Stella Levy, The Only Woman at City Lights Bookstore

Emma Breitman

JWA talks with Stella Levy about her appearance in an iconic photo from the 1960s, and how things have changed for women in the literary world since then. 

Tova Ricardo at a spoken word performance at a conference in 2021.

I’m a Black Jewish Woman and I’m Tired of Being Called “Angry”

Tova Ricardo

I refuse to choose between being a “good woman” or a woman who will not be intimidated, belittled, or silenced.

Roya Hakakian’s First Book, "Journey from the Land of No," is Published

August 1, 2004

Author and poet Roya Hakakian was born in Tehran in 1966 and fled Iran with her family in 1985, seeking asylum in the United States. Hakakian is the author of two collections of Persian poetry, an acclaimed memoir, and essays on Iranian issues.

Lesléa Newman

Lesbian feminist writer Lesléa Newman made history in 1989 with her controversial children’s book, Heather Has Two Mommies. Inspired by Newman’s friend, a lesbian mother who complained that there were no children’s books with families that looked like hers, the book sparked national controversy. Newman has written countless books for children, adolescents, and adults on homosexuality, Jewish identity, eating disorders, and AIDS.

Achy Obejas

Writer, translator, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956 and moved to the United States with her parents six years later. She is known for stories with characters and themes related to gender, queer sexuality, Cuban-ness, and Jewishness, as well as migration, displacement, and diaspora.

Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales is an author, artist, activist, and historian whose work as been critical to third-wave feminism, Puerto Rican and Latinx feminism, disability justice, radical Judaism, climate change activism, and grassroots. organizing.

Ruth Behar

Award-winning cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar has conducted groundbreaking research in Spain, Mexico, and her native Cuba. Her innovations in cultural representation have transformed ethnographic writing and reached a broad, non-academic audience through her film, poetry, personal essays, and young adult fiction.

Marjorie Agosín

Marjorie Agosín is an award-winning Chilean Jewish poet, memoirist, novelist, literary critic, editor, educator, and human rights activist. Her work, which she writes in Spanish, is widely translated into English and other languages. She is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Wellesley College.

Myriam Moscona

Myriam Moscona is a Sephardic Mexican poet, novelist, journalist, and translator. She is the author of Tela de sevoya/ Onioncloth, an award-wining novel about the Sephardic experience, reflecting on death and Ladino, and Ansina (Like that, 2015), a book of poetry entirely written in Judeo-Spanish.

Irena Klepfisz

Irena Klepfisz is a poet whose legacy is key to the history of Jewish, American and lesbian literature. Klepfisz is also a pioneer of the recovery of Jewish and Yiddish women’s writing, to which she has dedicated translations, research, teaching, and activism.

Alejandra Pizarnik

With a vast body of work that includes books of poetry, prose works, essays, and diaries, Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936-1972) stands out as one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century Latin American poetry.

Mahinarangi Tocker

New Zealand singer-songwriter Mahinaarangi Tocker (1955-2008) was best known as a Maori musician, but her Jewish heritage was an essential component of her identity and her music.

Erica Jong

Erica Jong is an American writer most famous for her bestselling novel Fear of Flying (1973). Sometimes controversial in her role as a media celebrity, Jong has published novels, poetry collections, memoirs, works of literary criticism, and literary anthologies, most often focusing on the explicit expression of women’s sexuality and neglected or untold stories of contemporary and historical women.

Zohra El Fassia

Zohra El Fassia was a renowned singer and recording artist in twentieth-century Morocco. Her life story moves between the burgeoning colonial recording industry in the Maghrib to North African immigrant histories in the south of Israel. El Fassia’s soulful music and powerful persona have resonated with generations of artists and activists who look to her for the unheard stories of Jews in the Arab and Muslim world and of Mizrahi Jews in Israel.

Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin is the Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College, a prolific poet, and a central figure in transgender theology. Her numerous written works reframe classical Jewish theological questions from a transfeminist perspective.  

Ana María Shua

Ana María Shua is an Argentine writer and screen writer who is internationally known as a specialist in short stories, in particular micro fiction tales, which are stories of just two or three lines of extension. She is well known in the Hispanic world as the Queen of the Microstory and employs her writing to narrate various aspects of the Jewish experience.

Cora Wilburn

Cora Wilburn was one of the most prolific American Jewish women writers of her time. Much of her work appeared in secular and Spiritualist publications, but during her final decades she published poetry in Jewish publications. Her autobiographical novel, Cosella Wayne, published serially in 1860, is the first coming-of-age novel to depict Jews in the United States.

Nancy Florence Keesing

Nancy Keesing was an influential figure on the Australian literary scene, not only as an author, editor, and critic, but also as an advocate and administration. She wrote poetry and ensured the preservation of nineteenth-century Australian songs and rhymes.

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