FACULTY | Department of English Literature and Linguistics

Ilana Blumberg

Creative Non-Fiction Coordinator

Ilana Blumberg is author of the memoir, Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (Rutgers UP, 2018) and Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman among Books (UNebraksa P, 2007), which won the Sami Rohr Choice Award in 2008 and was a runner up for both the National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies and the Moment Magazine Emerging Writer Award. Her essays have appeared in such publications as Michigan Quarterly Review; Image: a Journal of Religion and the Arts; and Lilith. She has won teaching awards from the University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University. She is also author of the scholarly monograph, Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels (Ohio State UP, 2014).

Evan Fallenberg

Fiction Coordinator

Evan Fallenberg s the author of three novels: Light Fell (2008); When We Danced on Water (2011); and The Parting Gift (2018). His selected translations include novels, stage plays and screenplays. His novels and translations have won or been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the American Library Association Stonewall/Barbara Gittings Book Award for Literature; the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; the National Jewish Book Award for fiction; the PEN Translation Prize; and the Times Literary Supplement Prize for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. Fallenberg was a guest faculty member of the MFA program in creative writing at City University of Hong Kong and is now faculty co-director of the low-residency International MFA program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The recipient of residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt, Banff Centre for the Arts and Sun Yat-sen University, he is the founder and artistic director of Arabesque: An Arts & Residency Center in Old Acre, and artistic director of the Translation Residency program at Mishkenot Shaananim, Jerusalem.

William Kolbrener

Creative Non-Fiction

William Kolbrener teaches Creative Non-Fiction in the program. A prolific essayist, his writings have appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward, Haaretz, the Jewish Review of Books, and Washington Post, among other publications. His much-praised first book of essays, Open-Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love was published by Continuum in 2011. (Go to his website to read more about the book and find links to other esssays.) Prof. Kolbrener is also a noted Miltonist and scholar of the Early Modern period in British literature and has written on the connection between literary theory and Jewish thought.

Michael P. Kramer

The William Solomon Jewish Arts Seminar

Michael P. Kramer was the founding editor of MAGGID: A Journal of Jewish Literature, is a co-organizer of Kisufim: The Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers, and serves on the advisory boards of The Sami Rohr Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and of JewishFiction.net. He 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, Modern Jewish Literatures, and The Turn Around Religion in America (click here for more). His annotated translation of S. Y. Agnon's And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight is due out from Toby Press in 2016. 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.

Marcela Sulak

Program Director

Marcela Sulak received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas and MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Her three collections of poetry include: Decency (2015), Immigrant (2010) and the chapbook Of All the Things that Don’t Exist, I Love You Best (2008). Her poetry translations include foundational Romantic-period Czech texts by Karel Hynek Macha & K.J. Erben, which have subtitled performances in the Prague National Theater and Czech animation and film. She's translated the Congolese poet Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha, and, from the Hebrew, Orit Gidali. She is co-editor of Family Resemblances: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Forms (2015). Her essays have won runner up in the Iowa Review nonfiction prize, and have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Rattle. Her work has been featured in the United States Library of Congress, and on Washington, DC metro buses. She hosts the TLV.1 radio show "Israel in Translation" and is an editor at Tupelo Review and The Ilanot Review.

Linda Stern Zisquit

Poetry

Linda Stern Zisquit teaches poetry and poetry translation. Educated at Tufts University, Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo, she has published five full-length collections of poetry, Return from Elsewhere (co-winner, Outriders Poetry Project, 2014), Havoc: New and Selected Poems(Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), The Face in the Window (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004), Unopened Letters (Sheep Meadow, 1996) and Ritual Bath (Broken Moon, 1993). In addition her translations from Hebrew include These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam (Toby Press, 2010), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (Poetry), Let the Words: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow, 2006) and Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow, 1997) for which she won an NEA Translation Grant and was short-listed for a PEN Translation Award. She has lived in Jerusalem since 1978 with her husband and five children. She runs ARTSPACE, a Jerusalem art gallery representing contemporary Israeli artists.