I am a writer because I don’t know how not to be one. Writing is the way I make sense of the world when it refuses to make sense on its own. It is how I hold pain without letting it destroy me, how I examine joy without distrusting it, and how I stay in relationship with ideas, people, and texts that challenge me. I write when things are going wrong, when things are going right, and especially when things are in between. Language is the place I go to think, to argue, to grieve, to pray, and to survive.

    I am a Jewish writer not because I only write about Judaism, but because I write Jewishly. I wrestle. I question. I refuse easy answers. I carry contradictions instead of resolving them. My work is shaped by an inherited tradition of argument, commentary, mourning, and memory — a tradition that says loving a text or a people does not require silence or compliance. It requires engagement. I write out of that inheritance, even when my writing is uncomfortable, critical, or raw.

    As a Sofer, I am trained to revere the act of writing itself. Letters matter. Space matters. Intention matters. Writing a single letter of Torah requires focus, humility, and awareness of one’s own imperfection. That discipline has fundamentally shaped how I approach all text. Even when I am writing poetry at three in the morning or adapting sacred texts into English, I carry with me the knowledge that words are vessels. They can heal, they can wound, and they can outlive the person who set them down. Being a Sofer taught me that holiness is not about flawlessness — it is about care.

    I am also a liturgist because I do not believe prayer should require dishonesty. Much of what I create exists because I could not find texts that made space for my reality: queer, mentally ill, exhausted, hopeful, frightened, faithful, and unsure all at once. I write prayers, poetry, translations, and commentary that assume human beings arrive imperfectly and stay that way. I refuse the idea that holiness is reserved for those who feel stable, certain, or complete. My theology, my liturgy, and my creative work all grow from the belief that what is unfinished is not unworthy.

    As a person, I live with mental illness, trauma, and deep empathy, and all three shape my voice. I am acutely aware of suffering, my own and others’, and that awareness makes it impossible for me to write shallowly. At the same time, I am stubbornly devoted to tenderness. Even in my darkest work, there is a refusal to dehumanize — even when the world makes that feel easier. I write in pursuit of honesty, not despair. Hope appears in my work not as optimism, but as persistence: getting through another night, returning again to the page, choosing to speak when silence feels safer.

    I am a convert to Judaism, and that awareness never leaves me. I do not take belonging lightly, and I do not romanticize it either. My writing reflects both fierce love and fierce accountability — to the text, to the tradition, and to the people I stand among. I know what it means to choose a community, and I know what it means to feel that choice tested. That tension lives openly in my work; it is not something I try to resolve.

    At my core, I am someone who believes that voice matters. My own voice, the voices of the dead, the silenced, the frightened, and the unfinished. I write because erasure is a kind of violence, and speaking is a form of resistance. I write because prayer can look like poetry, and poetry can become prayer. I write because I believe the world is still worth engaging, even when it is brutal. I write because the alternative — not writing, not speaking, not remembering — would mean disappearing. And I am not willing to do that.