Literary Modiin - May 2023 Author Event

About the authors:

Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his collection of stories, The View from Stalin’s Head. He is the author of two previous novels, Faith for Beginners, a Lambda Literary Award nominee, and Nirvana is Here, a Bronze Medal winner in the 2019 Foreword Indies Awards. He has won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and taught creative writing at Columbia University, George Washington University, New York University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program. His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Tablet, Tin House, and O, the Oprah Magazine.

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Judy Labensohn Lev, has been writing in English in Israel since 1967, when she came to Jerusalem for a one-year program. She forged her unique writer’s voice in personal essay columns for The Jerusalem Post and The Nation over a 20-year period. Poetry, essays and stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Lilith Magazine and Hadassah Magazine, among others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her writing has been anthologized in college writing textbooks. To support Anglo writers in Israel she founded The Writing Gym in Jerusalem and The Writing Pad in Moshav Beit Zayit and Tel Aviv. For six years she coordinated the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. She has mentored many Anglo-Israeli writers through publishing. Currently Lev lives with her partner David Kurz in Haifa, where she dances, sings in a jazz quartet, cuts hair, writes songs, and puts Emily Dickinson poems to music. Our Names Do Not Appear, published by Lioness Press, is her first book.

Jonathan Papernick was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of the acclaimed short story collection The Ascent of Eli Israel, another collection, There is no Other, and the novels The Book of Stone and I Am My Beloveds. His work has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and has been translated into Spanish and Italian. Papernick has taught fiction writing at Emerson College since 2007 and serves as Senior Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing. He has two sons and lives with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island. www.jonpapernick.com