Faculty

Evan Fallenberg, novelist and translator, fiction coordinator.  He is the author of two novels, Light Fell (2008) and When We Danced on Water (2011), which won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award for Literature and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. His selected translations include novels and creative nonfiction (Meir Shalev's My Russian Grandmother’s American Vacuum Cleaner and A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a PEN Translation Prize; Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Rajani; Ron Leshem's Beaufort, winner of a Times Literary Supplement Prize for the Translation of Hebrew Literature; Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem; Yair Lapid's Memories After My Death); theater and libretti (Gilad Evron's Ulysses on Bottles; Lior Navok's The Little Mermaid and Pinocchio); television and film (Adir Miller's House of Brown; Savi Gabizon's Longing); and miscellaneous fun stuff, like Max Brenner's Chocolate: A Love Story. 

Fallenberg has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is a guest faculty member of the MFA program in creative writing at City University of Hong Kong.
 

Bill Kolbrener will teach creative nonfiction during the spring semester in 2013. His first book of essays is Open-Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love (Continuum, 2011)  (www.openmindedtorah.com)  He is a Milton scholar who has written for Jewish Week, The Jerusalem Post,  Jewish Review of Books, and Washington Post, among others. For his faculty page at Bar-Ilan, click http://research.biu.ac.il/researcher/KolbrenerWilliam

Michael Kramer teaches the William Solomon Jewish Arts Seminar.  He edited MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature, and has authored and edited numerous books and essays on Jewish and American literature, including Imagining Language in America, New Essays on Seize the Day, and The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (with Hana Wirth Nesher).

He received his doctoral degree from Columbia University and taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Davis, before coming to Israel in 1994. His awards include a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and an Israel Science Foundation Grant. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and family.

  
Marcela Sulak, Director of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program, teaches poetry, translation, multi-genres and American literature. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame.  Her books of poetry include Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press, 2010) and Of All The Things That Don't Exist, I Love You Best (Finishing Line Press, 2008). She is the recipient of four Academy of American Poetry prizes, and her work has been featured in Verse Daily, and at the United States Library of Congress, and posted on the Virginia and Washington, DC metro buses as  part of the "Moving Words" competition. She has translated three collections of poetry: May by Karel Hynek Macha, which was the first book-length poem to have been written in the Czech language (Twisted Spoon Press, 2005, 2010), A Bouquet by K.J. Erben, (forthcoming from Twisted Spoon Press) and Bela-Wenda by the Congolese poet Mutombo Nkulu-N'Sengha (Host Publications, 2011). She is currently completing a scholarly book on migrant and immigrant poets in New York during the 1920s.  

Linda Stern Zisquit  teaches poetry and poetry translation, and is poetry coordinator. She was educated at Tufts University, Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo.

She has published three full-length collections of poetry, The Face in the Window (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004), Unopened Letters (Sheep Meadow, 1996) and Ritual Bath (Broken Moon, 1993), as well as a number of translations from Hebrew, including the work of Yona Wallach, Yehuda Amichai, and the Book of Ruth. Her translation from the work of Israeli poet Rivka Miriam, These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam (Toby Press, 2010) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, 2011. Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach won her an NEA Translation Grant and was short-listed for a PEN Translation Award. She was awarded a writer's grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for 2005-2006. Her chapbook of poems Ghazal-Mazal was published by Finishing Lines Press in 2011. She has recently completed a new full-length collection of poems called “Havoc.”She has lived in Jerusalem since 1978 with her husband and five children. She is founding director of ARTSPACE, a Jerusalem art gallery representing contemporary Israeli artists. 

Visiting Faculty 2012-2013

Sarah Van Arsdale's novels include Grande Isle, Blue, and Towards Amnesia. (Summer 2012)

Peter Brickelbank has published fiction in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Voice, Carolina Quarterly, Mid-American Review, Kansas Quarterly, Confrontation, Fiction, Florida Review, Global City Review, and elsewhere.  His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the American Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Minnesota Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), and others. (Summer 2012)

Joan Leegant (Spring 2013) is the author of a novel, Wherever You Go, and a story collection, An Hour in Paradise, which won the PEN/New England Book Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.