The University of Massachusetts Amherst's Joy Ladin (MFA ‘95) is having a good winter. In January 2022, the Jewish Book Council announced the 2021 National Book Award winners and Ladin’s The Book of Anna (EOAGH Books) won the Berru Poetry Award. Inaugurated in 1950, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest-running and most prestigious North American awards program of its kind. The Awards are intended to recognize authors, and encourage reading, of outstanding English-language books of Jewish interest.
Later in January, Ladin also received a finalist award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowships in Poetry. The MCC awards recognize exceptional work by Massachusetts artists across a range of disciplines. Highly competitive, these accolades catalyze artistic advancement and pave the way for creative innovation of enduring cultural value.
Ladin’s new collection of poetry, Shekhinah Speaks, will be out from selva oscura press in March 2022. Artist and writer, Gregg Bordowitz says, “These new poems speak in the fundamental and necessary language of true universal love with the passion of a prophet.” selva oscura press was founded in 2015 and is edited by Ken Taylor and Fred Moten to publish books and chapbooks from emerging and established poets, sometimes in collaboration with artists.
"Like many of us, I've found the past months to be among the hardest I've known,” says Joy Ladiin. “It's extraordinary to have so many good things happen, and I'm grateful to everyone who has helped me make it through to see them.”
Ladin is the author of The Future is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems, and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation as well as her memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. 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 transgender issues, Ladin has been featured on a number of NPR programs, including an “On Being” with Krista Tippett. Episodes of her online conversation series, “Containing Multitudes,” are available at JewishLive.org/multitudes; her writing is available at joyladin.wordpress.com.