MY STORY
I'm a native New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn and currently living in the Bronx. I’m the author of Escape of Light and Windows and a Looking Glass, a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition (Finishing Line Press). Much of my writing is informed by the unique experiences and challenges of growing up in the insular world of Hasidic Judaism.
I earned my BA and MA degrees in English/Creative Writing from CUNY Queens College, where I served as editor of the Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies and was the recipient of the James E. Tobin Poetry Award, the Lois Hughson Essay Prize, and the Essay Prize in Holocaust/Genocide Studies. I earned my MS in School Administration and Supervision from Touro College, after which I served as principal of a private school for Jewish children of Central Asian descent.
I’m a two-time winner, for poetry and fiction, of the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Award and the producer of the award-winning short film Write Me, adapted from my poems “After Auschwitz” and “Re(vision)”. My work has been selected as a finalist for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award and an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Glimmer Train Fiction Open.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in various print and online publications, including 3Elements Review, Literary Mama, Lunch Ticket, Mom Egg Review, New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, PRISM, Rise Up Review, Running Wild Anthology, Writers Resist, and Veils, Halos & Shackles, an international poetry anthology addressing the oppression and empowerment of women. I’m currently at work on a novel of interconnected short stories.