In a recent essay I wrote of growing up with my storytelling family in which “nothing simply happened, because, of course, there was always a story.” It wasn’t long before I began writing my own stories and found my life’s work. I love the excitement of the quick first draft and the tumbling out of thoughts as I try to find the right form, and then the harder work, no less joyful, of the deeper revisions, sculpting the words to form a pattern and arranging the material to shape a vision. My fiction has been published both nationally and internationally in anthologies, literary magazines and journals, and I am editor of Here I Am: Contemporary Jewish Stories From Around the World (Jewish Publication Society), which received the PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Award to recognize works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds. I hold graduate degrees in English and Creative Writing and a Doctor of Science in Jewish Studies. My dissertation examined the historical forces that have shaped Jewish life and the power of memory in the collective consciousness of the Jewish people. The Girls of Jerusalem and Other Stories is a new work of fourteen stories and a novella in which I link centuries and continents through Jewish history and memory, spanning many voices, places, and eras from the pre-modern period of the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, encompassing chronicles of love and loss, piety and heresy, mysticism and rationality and stories of exile, dislocation, and profound change. The work is defined by the use of ancient myth, prayer, texts, and history to reveal the timeless complexities of the human condition. When I’m not writing, I enjoy family activities, reading, study, and being an active member of my community.