About Translation and Transition
The Ilanot Review
Winter-Spring 2025
Translation and Transition
Managing Editor
Marcela Sulak
Guest Editors for Poetry
Jeremy Paden
Patty Seyburn
Guest Editor for Fiction
Taylor Johnston-Levy
Poetry Editor
Marcela Sulak
Creative Nonfiction Editors
Vivian Cohen-Leisorek
Jane Medved
Fiction Editors
Nadia Jacobson
Karen Marron
Associate Fiction Editor
Ronit Eitan
Event Coordinator
Yoni Hammer-Kossoy
Webmaster
Yossi Nachemi
Founding Editor
Janice Weizman
The Ilanot Review is an international journal publishing a variety of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and genres in between. We especially love translations and hybrid work. For each issue, guest editors join permanent volunteer staff, who are alumni and faculty from the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. We strive to create conversations here that could occur nowhere else.
The Ilanot Review Staff
Vivian Cohen-Leisorek is a Guatemalan-Israeli writer currently completing an MA in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. Her work has appeared in The Tel Aviv Review of Books, Paper Brigade Daily, Underground and BusinessWeek, among others. She is the second-place winner of the 2024 Dave Greber Nonfiction Social Justice Awards.
Ronit Eitan is a writer, humorist, and creative director of Writing on the Wall. She co-founded בלאגן (Balagan), a quarterly publication that explores the intersections of language, wit, and culture. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bar-Ilan University and resides in Tel Aviv.
Nadia Jacobson was born in London and currently lives in Jerusalem. She holds an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Bar-Ilan University, in addition to an MA in Philosophy from University College London and a BA in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy from Cambridge University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Miramichi Review, The Waking, Meniscus, Annalemma, The Binnacle, Every Day Fiction and a number of anthologies. She is currently working on two interweaving novels.
Taylor Johnston-Levy is a fiction writer and academic based in Tel Aviv. She holds a postdoctoral fellowship in foreign literatures at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and teaches US literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University. Her fiction and literary critical work appear in Ninth Letter, Twentieth-Century Literature, Critique, Arizona Quarterly, and The Raymond Carver Review. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and MA in Creative Writing from UC Berkeley.
Karen Marron is the author of the fiction chapbook BASS 1998, published in 2020 by Gold Line Press. Her work has also appeared in The Bellingham Review, Entropy, and Unbroken Journal, among others. She received her MA in Creative Writing from Bar-Ilan University in 2008, and currently lives in Queens. Find her at karenmarron.com.
Jane Medved is the author of Wayfarers (forthcoming from Grid Books 2024) Deep Calls To Deep (winner of the Many Voices Project, New Rivers Press) and the chapbook Olam, Shana, Nefesh (Finishing Line Press). Her translation of Wherever We Float (by Maya Tevet Dayan) won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize and is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books. Recent work has appeared in Bending Genres, ONE ART, Literary Mama, Ruminate, The North American Review and The Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology. Her awards include winner of the 2021 RHINO translation prize and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize – Honorable Mention. Her translations of Hebrew poetry can be seen in Hala, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Copper Nickel. She is a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv. Find her at janemedved.net.
Jeremy Paden is a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He writes poetry in English and Spanish and translates poetry into and out of both languages. He is the author of several collections of poems and has translated poets from across Latin America and Spain. His translation of Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind into Spanish will appear in August of 2024 with Valparaíso Ediciones out of Granada, Spain.
Patty Seyburn has previously published five collections of poems: Threshold Delivery (Finishing Line Press, 2019); Perfecta (What Books Press, Glass Table Collective, 2014); Hilarity, (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is a professor at California State University, Long Beach.
Marcela Sulak is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault (2024) and the National Jewish Book Award Finalist, City of Sky Papers (2021). Her four translated collections of poetry from the Czech, French, and Hebrew have been awarded the NEA Translation Fellowship and long-listed for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has co-edited the 2015 Rose Metal Press title, Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Associate Professor of Literature, Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Yoni Hammer-Kossoy is a poet, translator, and educator. Winner of the 2020 Andrea Moriah Prize in Poetry, his writing appears in numerous international journals and anthologies. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Yoni has lived with his family in Jerusalem for the last 25 years. Yoni’s first poetry collection, “The Book of Noah”, was published by Grayson Books in April 2023, and his first full-length translation of a Hebrew poetry collection, “Ana Samar – I Am Samar” by Zmira Poran Zion, was published in September 2023.
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Table of Contents for Translation and Transition