Lunar Calendar

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.