Elana Dykewomon was a poet, novelist, editor, theorist, lesbian, and cultural worker. Her lesbian and Jewish identities and commitments informed and shaped her award-winning novels and other writings, and she made significant theoretical contributions to lesbian separatism and fat liberation.

The Mexican Ashkenazi poet Gloria Gervitz (1943–2022) is known for her award-winning, book-length poem Migrations (Migraciones). This poem, an epic journey through the individual and collective memories of Ashkenazi women emigrants to Mexico, which she began writing in 1976, took her 44 years to complete. In 2018, Gervitz won the prestigious Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award for Migraciones.

Julia Vinograd was a street poet and the author of 68 slender volumes of verse widely admired for their vivid portraits of bohemians and street people in twentieth-century Berkeley, California. Her writing, which evolved in café open mic readings, is notable for its oratorical clarity, emotional warmth, and surreal imagination. 

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.