Aaron Samuels started getting hype as a poet as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. A co-founder of the school’s popular slam poetry team, WUSLAM, his compelling performances and the depth of his investigation into what it meant to be black and Jewish made him stand out. He’s continued to make his name…
Roy Hasan has been described as the Israeli Eminem. The subversive, indignant, radical 32-year-old Mizrahi poet from a housing project outside Haifa received the prestigious Bernstein Prize and an award of 50,000 NIS from the Israeli Publishers Association this past July. His provocative poem “If There’ll Be Peace, All the Arsim Will Come” sheds light…
A poem by an 11th grade girl from a Hasidic family in Crown Heights has gone viral on social media. “Worst Day Ever?” by Chanie Gorkin was first posted last year on the Poetry Nation website, where Chanie is a member. She was a semi-finalist in the website’s July to December 2014 contest and the…
In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner By Tuvia Ruebner, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back Hebrew Union College/University of Pittsburgh Press, 396 pages, $39.95 Tuvia Ruebner is a poet’s poet. Though distinguished and admired in Hebrew and German literary circles, and despite having publishing 15 books of poetry in Hebrew, he was little…
In the beginning I was given everything And what did I do With myself and your treasures? Only one thing I ask Animates my coming and going Inside your house In the beginning, Given inner speech Enfold us within your sanctuary of hands Inside the tent of every wish Encamped, beloved
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes By Langston Hughes Edited by Arnold Rampersand Knopf, 480 pages, $35 These missives written by one of the most limpid African-American poets are self-concealing in the extreme. Langston Hughes was so discreet that when he was hospitalized for gonorrhea in 1941, he told intimate friends that the problem was arthritis….
Aurora, the daughter of Rosario. Lesléa, the daughter of Florence. The mothers are invoked; their names are eternal. Aurora Levins Morales and Lesléa Newman came together on a recent Sunday afternoon in Boston under the auspices of Keshet—a national organization dedicated to the inclusion of LGBT Jews in all aspects of Jewish life — to…
The poet Yisroel Shtern (1894-1942) was reluctant to publish his own work, once writing about the “over-proliferation of books on this planet.” Nonetheless, in a 1929 dictionary of Yiddish writers, Zalmen Reyzen called him “one of the most important young Yiddish poets in Poland today, though for a full appreciation of his poetry… we must…
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