Yiskah Rosenfeld holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and an MA in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley; she is also a proud rabbinical school dropout. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her many awards include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish experience and the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize. Most recently, she was awarded a 2023 Frontier Poetry Roots & Roads Prize. She is the author of Tasting Flight (Madville Books, 2024), the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize runner-up and a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Naked Beside Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2023), an ekphrastic chapbook shaped like a museum exhibit. Her oems and essays appear in over 50 publications, including The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Lilith Magazine, Rattle, December Magazine, Tikkun Daily, and elsewhere. Her writings have been selected for anthologies such as Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, Why to these Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers, and Yentl’s Revenge: the Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. 

Yiskah feels most human and joyful when teaching, whether creating a literature and Jewish Studies mash-up as an adjunct professor at Temple University or launching a creative writing program for schools in underserved neighborhoods as a San Francisco WritersCorps instructor. Passionate about collaboration and crossing boundaries, she served as poet-in-residence on the Arad Arts Project in the Israeli desert and at the Brandeis Collegiate Institute in Simi Valley, California. She has been a member of the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley since 2001. Yiskah currently  lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she balances solo parenting with teaching workshops on spirituality, feminism, and creative writing.