Present Tense: Writing Jewish Stories for Today, Sponsored by Jewish Book Council
Thursday, March 5, 12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m. ET
Ballroom II, Baltimore Convention Center, Level 400
Why do Jewish stories matter? What are the unique challenges and responsibilities—and inspiring possibilities—of writing Jewish fiction today? What does it mean to build a Jewish bookshelf that speaks to today’s readers, as Jewish Book Council’s newest program, Nu Reads, is physically doing, one month at a time? This panel brings together three acclaimed authors to discuss weaving personal experiences into one’s work, how fiction can engage and educate a broad readership about the diversity of Jewish cultural heritage, how Jewish authors can navigate the publishing world, and how to envision the role of Jewish stories in the future.
Maya Arad is the author of Happy New Years, The Hebrew Teacher, and ten other books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London. For the past twenty years, she has lived in California, where she is currently a writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies.
Photo Credit: Mira Mamon
Esther Chehebar is the author of the novel Sisters of Fortune and the illustrated children's book I Share My Name. Chehebar is a contributing writer at Tablet magazine, where she covers Sephardic Jewish tradition and community, and a member of Sephardic Bikur Holim, a nonprofit supporting the growing Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the New School and lives in New York.
Photo credit: Shelly Schmool
Sam Sussman is the author of the USA Today bestselling novel Boy from the North Country. The book was named Oprah’s most anticipated debut novel of the fall and was hailed by Kirkus as “the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory,” and Sussman was recently profiled in The New York Times. Boy from the North Country is based on Sussman’s Harper’s Magazine memoir piece “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son.” Sussman graduated with a BA from Swarthmore and an MPhil from Oxford and has lived in Jerusalem and Berlin. He lives in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan and his native Hudson Valley.
Photo Credit: Ben Kaplan
Josh Rolnick’s short story collection, Pulp and Paper, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. His short stories have also won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and The Florida Review Editors’ Choice Prize and have been published in Slate, Tel Aviv Review of Books, Paper Brigade, Boulevard, Meridian, Harvard Review, Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, and others. He is a faculty lecturer at the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program and fiction editor of Paper Brigade. Rolnick currently serves as the vice president of the board of directors of the Jewish Book Council, and he is a facilitator for Resetting the Table.
