Dr. Joy Ladin, David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English and director of the Beren Writing Center at Stern College for Women, has been nominated for a $50,000 United States Artists fellowship. The fellowship, which is unrestricted, is awarded to artists in recognition for their contributions to the field and allowing them to decide how to best support their lives. Nominations are anonymous, and United States Artists works annually with select nominators, panelists and their Board of Trustees to determine each year’s class of awardees. She has also been informed that a new poem just published has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize: “You Will Never See Me as Your Mother” in Lavender Review (Dec. 1, 2019). (The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize published by Pushcart Press that honors the best “poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot” published in the small presses over the previous year. Every year since 1976, Pushcart Press has published an anthology of that year’s prize winners.) Dr. Ladin was also scheduled to speak at this year’s Society for Biblical Literature conference in San Diego on “‘The Voice is the Voice of Jacob, but the Hands are the Hands of Esau’: Recognizing Trans Experience in Biblical Texts.” However, she was unable to attend, but a section from her recent book, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, was read as part of the panel on “LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics.”