Rabbi Paul Kipnes is the co-creator of Midrashic Monologues, the spiritual leader of Congregation Or Ami in Calabasas, CA, author, with his wife Michelle November, of Jewish Spiritual Parenting: Wisdom, Activities, Rituals and Prayers for Raising Children with Spiritual Balance and Emotional Wholeness. Dean of Faculty of URJ Camp Newman, Rabbi Kipnes also leads Federation-funded mental health and wellness project to realign the synagogue’s reality with its vision to be a safe space for teens. Learn more about Rabbi Kipnes and his work at www.paulkipnes.com.

Rabbi Rachel Bearman is the co-creator of Midrashic Monologues, the spiritual leader of Temple B’nai Chaim in Georgetown, CT, and the Communications and Marketing Vice President of the Women’s Rabbinic Network. Rabbi Bearman is the seventh generation of her family to be connected with a liberal synagogue and has a deep and abiding love of Reform Judaism’s commitment to the pursuit of justice. Learn more about Rabbi Bearman and her work at www.RabbiRachelBearman.com.

Sophie Hurwitz is JWA’s 2019-2020 New Voices Fellow. She is a lifelong St. Louis resident who was recently transplanted to Massachusetts to study History and Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. At Wellesley, she serves as News Editor for the college newspaper, and is a student activist working on issues surrounding mass incarceration. Sophie is excited to bring her passion for historical writing and the Jewish community to JWA, and can be found on Twitter @sophiehurwitz.

Rebecca Brenner Graham is a History Teacher at the Madeira School and an Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University. Rebecca’s debut narrative nonfiction book on Frances Perkins’s refugee policy will be published by Kensington in 2025. Rebecca holds a PhD in History from American University. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @TheOtherRBG and on Instagram @basicbookstagrammer. 

 

An award-winning lifestyle journalist, food critic, and poet, Jen Karetnick's work has appeared or is forthcoming in theatlantic.com, Guernica, Miami Herald, NPR, Shondaland.com, and USA Today, among others. Based in Miami, where she lives in a historic home in a bird sanctuary, she is the author of four cookbooks, four guidebooks, and ten books of poetry. See @Kavetchnik on Twitter or @JenKaretnick on Instagram for more.

Maia Evrona is a poet and prose writer, originally from the Boston area. Her poems, as well as her translations of Yiddish poetry, have been awarded grants from the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Arts, and have been widely published. In addition to translating from Yiddish, her own poetry was included, in her own English to Yiddish translation, in Radiant Jargon; Six Poems about Yiddish, published by the Yiddish Book Center. She also translates from Spanish, and writes a great deal about chronic illness and disability. Her website is maiaevrona.com and you can find her on Twitter at @maiaevrona.

Leah Kaminsky, is a physician and award-winning writer. Her debut novel The Waiting Room won the prestigious Voss Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Helen Asher Award (Vintage Australia 2015, Harper Perennial US 2016). Her second novel, The Hollow Bones, is forthcoming with Vintage in 2019 and The Fish Council will be published by UQP in 2020. We’re all Going to Die has been described as “a joyful book about death” (Harper Collins, 2016). She edited Writer MD (Knopf US, starred on Booklist) and co-authored Cracking the Code (Vintage 2015). Stitching Things Together was a finalist in the Anne Elder Award. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. (www.leahkaminsky.com)