Tapestries of Shadow and Light: Three Writers and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Meet authors Rachel Hall, Elizabeth Rosner and Hilary Zaid as they read from their work and discuss how the Holocaust continues to resonate in their lives and in their writing.

Books will be available for sale and signing courtesy of Laurel Book Store.

More about the authors:

Rachel Hall is the author of Heirlooms (BkMk Press), which was selected by Marge Piercy for the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize. Winner of the Phillip McMath Post Publication Award, Heirlooms was also the runner-up for the Edward Wallant award, and finalist for the Balcones Prize for Fiction, the Montaigne Medal, and the Eric Hoffer Award. It was longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize. Rachel’s short stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies including Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, and New Letters, which awarded her the Alexander Cappon Prize for Fiction. She has received other honors and awards from Lilith, Glimmer Train, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, Ragdale, the Ox-Bow School of the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Her family’s wartime papers and photographs, the inspiration for these stories, are housed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Elizabeth Rosner is an internationally award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, whose books have been translated into ten languages. Her national-bestselling first novel,The Speed of Light, won Hadassah Magazine’s Ribalow Prize of 2001, judged by Elie Wiesel. Her second novel Blue Nude and her third novel Electric City were named by The San Francisco Chronicle and NPR among the best books of 2006 and 2014, respectively.

Born in Schenectady, New York, Rosner is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, and much of her work is inspired by the impact of their experiences on her imagination and identity. Her newest book, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, published in fall 2017, was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and in The New York Times. She holds degrees from Stanford, UC Irvine, and the University of Queensland in Australia, and she lives in Berkeley.

Hilary Zaid is the author of Paper is White, a novel. A 2017 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she is also an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online venues including Lilith Magazine, The Southwest Review, The Utne Reader, CALYX, The Santa Monica Review, and The Tahoma Literary Review and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. An alumna of Harvard and Radcliffe, she holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland with her family.