Joy Ladin

Joy Ladin, Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University, is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, and she was named to the 2012 Forward 50 list of influential or courageous American Jews. A work of creative non-fiction, The Soul of the Stranger, about reading the Torah from a transgender perspective, is due out in 2018 from Brandeis University Press. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists, Transmigration and Impersonation. Two new collections, Fireworks in the Graveyard (Headmistress Press) and The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press) are coming out in 2017. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors. A nationally recognized speaker on trans and Jewish identity, she was recently named to LGBTQ Nation's Top 50 Transgender Americans list. Links to her work can be found at joyladin.com.

http://joyladin.com