In Conversation with Joy Ladin

In Conversation with Joy Ladin

Date

Mar 14 2021
, 5PM- 6PM

Presented in partnership with the Baltimore Festival of Jewish Literature.

Recorded on March 14, 20201.

Resources Shared During the Program:

Cropped image of the cover of "The Book of Anna" showing the title and author on a sunset background. The tops of a few city buildings are just visible in the bottom of the image.

Join poet, essayist, and teacher Dr. Joy Ladin for a look at her extensive body of work, particularly The Book of Anna.

The Book of Anna is written in the voice of a fictional character, Anna Asher, daughter of a briefly famous pianist who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and is writing in 1950’s Prague, where she works as a receptionist for the secret police. This genre-defying book combines prose diary entries that offer intimate glimpses of Anna’s present – her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition – with autobiographical poems, each made out of bits of a different sacred Jewish text, that recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. 

You can preorder The Book of Anna here.

About the Author:

Joy Ladin holds the Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University. A poet, memoirist, and essayist, she long worked at the intersection of gender identity, religious tradition, and literature. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and prompted conversations about trans and Jewish identities around country.

Her most recent book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, a Lambda Literary Award and Triangle Award finalist, is the first book-length work of trans theology from a Jewish perspective. She has published nine books of poetry, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists and, most recently, The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems.

Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, among other honors. She serves on the Board of Keshet, an organization devoted to full inclusion of LGTBQ Jews in the Jewish world. Episodes of her online conversation series, “Containing Multitudes,” are available at JewishLive.org/multitudes; links to her writing are available at joyladin.wordpress.com

About the Publisher:

EOAGH publishes perfect-bound books on an occasional basis, usually one book per year. Our books have won two Lambda Literary Awards, and have been reviewed in The Brooklyn RailJacket2Literary HubThe Poetry Project NewsletterSilliman’s BlogTarpaulin SkyCutbank PoetryBlackbox ManifoldSensitive SkinThe Conversant, and LadyClever.

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