Jessica Greenbaum

Jessica Greenbaum, is the co-editor, with Rabbi Hara Person, of CCAR Press' Mishkan HaSeder: A Passover Haggadah (2021). A poet, teacher, and social worker, her first book of poems, Inventing Difficulty (2000), won the Gerald Cable Prize; her second book, The Two Yvonnes (2012), was called a "Best Book of Poetry for 2012" by Library Journal, and of her third book, Spilled and Gone (2019), the poet Tony Hoagland said, "When I read it, I feel myself open and relax into the world." Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, Paris Review and elsewhere, and for twelve years she was the poetry editor for the literary journal upstreet. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and the Agnes di Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia, including at Barnard and Vassar Colleges, Brooklyn Poets and DOROT'S senior center. Since 2015, she has been creating poetry reading and writing classes around Jewish text. Some classes investigate the organic relationship between basic Jewish values–like close reading, distinction through separation, and tikkun olam–with those same values found in poetry. Others pair themes found in traditional Jewish texts–Torah, Pirkei Avot, The Psalms–with themes reflected in contemporary poems. She has taught for years in Manhattan's Central Synagogue, and more recently in Brooklyn's Congregation Beth Elohim. As a social worker, she has taught poetry reading and writing to some communities who have experienced trauma, including at Footsteps, the nation's only agency for people who have left ultra-Orthodoxy, and for cancer survivors in the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation. Learn more about Jessica here. (Photograph: Leslie-Jean Bart)