Faculty | Department of English Literature and Linguistics

Program Director

Marcela Sulak Directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing and teaches poetry, translation and hybrid genres. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including the National Jewish Book Award finalist, City of Sky Papers (2021). Her nonfiction includes the memoir Mouth Full of Seeds (2020) and Family Resemblances: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres (2015).For her translations from Hebrew, Czech, French, Spanish, and Yiddish, she's won an 2019 NEA Fellowship and 2017 PEN Poetry in Translation Award nomination. Her work has been featured at the United States Library of Congress, posted on the buses of Virginia and Washington, DC., and has subtitled avant-garde ballets in the Prague National Theater, and films in the the Ancy international festival of animation and the Warsaw film festival. She hosts the TLV.1 podcast, Israel in Translation, and is managing editor of The Ilanot Review. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and her MFA from The University of Notre Dame.

Faculty

Ilana Blumberg is the author of Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American , and Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman among Books, winner of the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature. Ilana has written for Public Books, Lilith, The Forward, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Image, as well as 929 in English. She publishes regularly in the field of Victorian studies and is the author of the scholarly monograph, Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century England. Her current scholarly project is a spiritual life of the novelist George Eliot entitled, "George Eliot: Whole Soul." For more information, see her website, https://www.ilanablumberg.info/

Evan Fallenberg is chair of the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University and was founder and faculty co-director of the Vermont College of Fine Arts International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. He served for five years as artistic director of the Translation Residency program at Mishkenot Shaananim in Jerusalem. Fallenberg is the author of the novels Light Fell (Soho Press 2008), When We Danced on Water (HarperCollins 2011) and The Parting Gift (Other Press 2018). He is a translator of Hebrew stage plays, operas, films and fiction, including Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Stonewall Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the PEN Translation Prize. He is the recipient of residency fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony (US), Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt (Switzerland), Sun Yat-sen University (China), Reykjavik UNESCO City of World Literature (Iceland), and the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). He is the founder of Arabesque: An Arts and Residency Center in Old Acre.

William Kolbrener teaches creative nonfiction. His first book of essays is Open-Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love (Continuum, 2011) (www.openmindedtorah.com) He has written for the Jewish Daily Forward, Haaretz, the Jewish Review of Books, and Washington Post, among others. For his academic interests, see his faculty page: http://english.biu.ac.il/faculty/kolbrener-william.

Michael P. 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, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (with Hana Wirth Nesher), Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (with Sheila Jelen and Scott Lerner), The Turn Around Religion in America (with Nan Goodman), and, most recently, an annotated translation of S.Y. Agnon's And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight.

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 two Israel Science Foundation Grants. He's been a Fellow of Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania and, since 2006, a Fellow of the Sami Rohr Institute for Jewish Literature. He lives with his wife in Jerusalem.

Visiting Faculty

Yael Hacohen

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was long listed to the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, and has been published internationally. She has written for The New York Times, McLean’s, Foreign Policy, The Forward, The Globe and Mail, among others. For more information visit ayelettsabari.com.

Past Faculty

Linda Stern Zisquit was educated at Tufts University, Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo. Her poetry collections include Havoc: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), Ghazal-Mazal (Finishing Lines Press, 2011) The Face in the Window (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004), Unopened Letters (Sheep Meadow, 1996) and Ritual Bath (Broken Moon, 1993), Her translations from Hebrew include the work of Yehuda Amichai and the Book of Ruth. Her translation 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. . ”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.