Rachel Kadish’s fiction focuses on the ways Jewish women struggle to fulfill their longings and dreams despite the limitations of the times and places in which they live. Kadish graduated from Princeton in 1991 before earning a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University. She published her first novel, From a Sealed Room, in 1998, telling the story of the intersecting lives of a Holocaust survivor, an Israeli housewife, and a young American Jew. She followed this with Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story (2006) and a novella, I Was Here (2014). In 2017 she published The Weight of Ink, which focuses on a woman who becomes the scribe for a blind rabbi in 17th-century Amsterdam, just as the Black Plague reaches the city. She has been honored as a fiction fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts and been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize Anthology and has won the John Gardner Fiction Award (2007, for Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story) and the National Jewish Book Award (2017 for The Weight of Ink), among other awards. As of 2024, Kadish teaches creative writing at Lesley University.