Biography
Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books, 2021), winner of The Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection, and Foreword INDIES Finalist; and The Grammar of God (Spiegel & Grau/ Penguin Random House 2015), a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, Sami Rohr Prize Finalist, and one of Publishers’ Weekly’s Top Religion Stories of the Year. She is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow in translation.
She is The Forward’s language columnist, and her essays have appeared in Longreads, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Wilson Quarterly. Her work has been supported by the Howard Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture. She serves on the executive committee in nonfiction at the Modern Languages Association, the board of the American Literary Translators Association, the advisory board of the Jewish Languages Project and the advisory board for Bloomsbury’s series in creative writing. She is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Degrees
B.A., Writing Johns Hopkins University 1995
M.A., Creative Writing Boston University 1998
M.F.A., English University of Iowa 2005