Since she was in sixth grade, Beth Kissileff has wanted to get paid to read. She has more or less succeeded at that. When she was a sophomore in college, she took a Bible in Literature class and realized that she was probably the least knowledgeable person in the room because her Hebrew was limited. She understood that to know more about Judaism and Jewish texts, she needed the language and the best way to learn a language is immersion.

Beth is the author of Reading Genesis and Questioning Return. She currently lives in Pittsburgh with her family. She works as a journalist and writes regularly in Tablet, the Forward, the New York Jewish Week, the New York Times, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, the Jerusalem Report and others. She has had writer’s residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and highly recommends the residency experience as one of the few material perks writing brings. Her time at Yaddo has been the only time in her life someone made lunch for her so she could write!