Literary Modiin June 2022 Author Event

More about the authors:

Michal Lemberger’s debut collection, After Abel and Other Stories, was a National Jewish Book Award finalist, Honorable Mention for the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, finalist for the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction, and a National Jewish Book Club pick. Her nonfiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including  Real Simple, Slate, Salon, and Tablet. Her poetry has been published in a number of print and online journals, including The Bellevue Literary Review and The Rattling Wall. “Lot’s Wife,” from After Abel and Other Stories, was featured in Lilith Magazine. Excerpts of “City of Refuge” appeared in LitroNY and “After Abel” in The Nervous Breakdown. Lemberger holds an MA and PhD in English from UCLA and a BA in English and Religion from Barnard College. She has taught the Hebrew Bible as Literature at UCLA and the American Jewish University. She was born and raised in New York and now lives, writes, and teaches in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the forthcoming story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, 2023). His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. 

Rena Rossner lives in Israel where she works as a Literary Agent. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars program, Trinity College Dublin and McGill University where she studied history. All eight of her great grandparents immigrated to America to escape the pogroms in Moldova, Russia, Romania and the Ukraine - from towns like Dubossary, Kupel, Riga and Bendera. It is their story, together with her love of Jewish mythology and fantasy, that inspired her to write The Sisters of the Winter Wood.