Lilith Writers Make News

Alice Sparberg Alexiou, a Lilith contributing editor, has just published Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, exploring the life and work of the self-taught urban theorist, whose trailblazing Death and Life of Great American Cities (Rutgers University Press, 2006) has been a classic for over four decades. Jacobs died in April, a few months before the book’s U.S. publication.

Tamara Fishman, a former Lilith intern who’s now a singer/songwriter, has just released a new CD, “The Hunger and the Silence,” on which she sings, plays the guitar and waxes poetic. Her appealing mix of folk, soul and blues was described as “classic” and “timeless” by East-Village.com and she was one of the Spring Artists-in- Residence at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y. Find out more at www.tamarubi.com.

Lilith fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough has won the Once Upon a World Children’s Book Award for The Doll with the Yellow Star (Henry Holt, 2005). Created by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the prize is awarded to children’s books “which deal with issues of tolerance, diversity, human understanding and social justice, thus inspiring a young reader to promote positive change in the world.”

The Doll with the Yellow Star is the story of eight-year-old Claudine and her beloved doll, Violette. The inspiration for the book, McDonough says, was a Lilith article by Susan Schnur, “Badges of Shame” (Fall 1989), based on interviews with the real-life Claudine, Trudie Strobel. McDonough’s book is dedicated to Schnur.

Shirim: A Jewish Poetry Journal, focused a recent issue on the poetry of Myra Sklarew, former Lilith poetry editor and judge of Lilith’s 2006 Charlotte Newberger Poetry Competition. Shirim editor Marc Dworkin writes that these poems “inform us how necessary it is…to live through the eyes of those who have come before”.