Writing through thoughts of suicide, illness, loneliness, and despair to arrive at her definition of “joy,” she gives us a portrait of a “soul in and out of flesh, a marriage out of love, and a body from amputation to wholeness.” Stanley Moss has praised Ladin’s The Definition of Joy for its “useful truth.” “She plays profoundly with her name and holy names in the temple and synagogues of her sexuality that is also our doing and undoing. Her works courageously chronicle the excruciating but necessary labor to become an honest self. Her seven books of poems as well as her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, are testament to that desire to make meaning-meaning filtered through and driven by her personal journey of transition. Ladin has said that poetry is about creating meaning in a world where meaning is in short supply, where meanings are constantly degenerating into cliché, fashion, empty performance and sarcasm. She was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Forward Fives winner, and was recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship. Ladin has authored seven books of poetry: Impersonation(2015), The Definition of Joy (2012), Coming to Life (2010), Psalms (2010), Transmigration (2009), The Book of Anna (2006), and Alternatives to History (2003). Her work has appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southwest Review, among others. She has also taught widely: Graduate Program of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence, Princeton University, Tel Aviv University, Reed College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They are scholarly, yet extremely approachable, and filled with great humor and heartbreaking sadness. Ladin’s poems are at once ferocious and tender. As the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, she approaches the intersection of gender identity and Judaism, gender identity and religious worldviews with a scholar’s erudition and a poet’s sensibility.

JOY LADIN holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University.

Joy ladin through the door of life