I am a poet, a memoirist, an essayist, and a translator of Yiddish poetry. Originally from Massachusetts, I grew up with a serious illness. After having been too ill to attend secondary school and college, I was accepted into the Bennington Writing Seminars at the age of twenty, without a bachelor’s degree. Since then my poems, as well as excerpts from my memoir on cillness, have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review and elsewhere. In 2019, I was the inaugural recipient of the joint Spain-Greece Fulbright Scholar Award–a prize I was re-awarded in 2021 after the original grant was interrupted by the pandemic. Though my mother’s family was fluent in Yiddish, I did not grow up speaking the language. I taught it to myself with a textbook as a teenager, before studying it formally in Lithuania. I have received grants for my translations from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Yiddish Book Center and the American Literary Translators Association. My first full-length translation collection “From a Bird’s Cage to a Thin Branch; The Selected Poems of Yoysef Kerler,” is forthcoming from White Goat Press. Over a hundred of my translations of individual poems have appeared in literary journals.
About Lunar Calendar
In order to understand the value of shmita, it is important to understand the standard Jewish calendar we experience year in, year out. I am submitting a series of poems exploring the rituals in that calendar, poems that find space to reflect within each ritual, a space not unlike that of shmita. These poems have been published individually, but the series has never been published as a whole.