Orly Castel-Bloom was born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to parents originally from Egypt. After studying film at the Beit Zvi Institute and Tel Aviv University, she published her first collection of stories in 1987 and has been a leading voice in Hebrew literature ever since, constantly expanding the boundaries of the Hebrew language as well as of narrative style. Castel-Bloom has lectured at Harvard University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and New York University, as well as at Oxford and Cambridge Universities; at present she teaches creative writing at Tel Aviv University. She has published novels, collections of short stories, and a book for children. Her postmodern classic, Dolly City, has been included in UNESCO`s Collection of Representative Works, and was nominated in 2007 one of the ten most important books since the creation of the State of Israel. Castel-Bloom has received the Tel Aviv Foundation Award (1990), the Alterman Prize for Innovation (1993), the Prime Minister’s Prize three times (1994, 2001, 2011) , the Newman Prize (2003), the French WIZO Prize for Human Parts (2005) and the Leah Goldberg Prize (2007). Her books have been published abroad in eleven languages.
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Joe Lockard is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University, where he directs the Antislavery Literature Project and Project Yao. He is the coeditor of Iraq War Cultures (Peter Lang, 2011) and the author of Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports (Peter Lang, 2008). Lockard teaches early American literature, early African American literature, comparative ethnic literatures, and social protest literature.
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