She serves on the Board of Keshet, an organization devoted to full inclusion of LGTBQ Jews in the Jewish world. 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 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 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. 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. A poet, memoirist, and essayist, she long worked at the intersection of gender identity, religious tradition, and literature. Joy Ladin holds the Gottesman Chair in English at Yeshiva University. 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. 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. Joy Ladin for a look at her extensive body of work, particularly The Book of Anna.

You can read more about the Baltimore Festival of Jewish Literature here.

You can read more about EOAGH, the publishers of The Book of Anna here.

You can listen to the conversation series “Containing Multitudes” here.

You can pre-order your copy of the Book of Anna here.

Joy ladin through the door of life