Adina Hoffman
Encyclopedia
About
Born in Jackson, MississippiJackson, Mississippi
Jackson is the capital and the most populous city of the US state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County ,. The population of the city declined from 184,256 at the 2000 census to 173,514 at the 2010 census...
in 1967, Hoffman grew up in Peterborough, New Hampshire
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Peterborough is a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 6,284 at the 2010 census. Home to the MacDowell Art Colony, the town is a popular tourist destination....
and Houston, Texas, and graduated from Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
in 1989. She has lived in Jerusalem since 1992 and writes often about the Middle East and its people, especially those who are overlooked in standard journalistic or textbook-styled accounts.
Her first book, House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (Steerforth Press, 2000, Broadway Books, 2002) consists of a series of linked essays about her North African Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. It was described by Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus . Kirkus serves the book and literary trade sector, including libraries, publishers, literary and film agents, film and TV producers and booksellers. Kirkus Reviews is published on the first and 15th of each month...
as “steadily perceptive and brimming with informed passion.” In 2009 Yale University Press
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
brought out her My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, a life and times of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali
Taha Muhammad Ali
Taha Muhammad Ali was a Palestinian poet.-Biography:Taha Muhammad Ali fled to Lebanon with his family when he was seventeen after their village came under heavy bombardment during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The following year, he returned to Nazareth, where he lived till his death...
. The first biography ever published about a Palestinian writer, My Happiness was awarded Britain’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and was named one of best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the top ten biographies of the year by Booklist. Writing in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, Boyd Tonkin called it “a remarkable book… A triumph of personal empathy and historical insight and a beacon for anyone who believes that ‘more joins than separates us.’” A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation
Guggenheim Foundation
Guggenheim Foundation may refer to one of the following:*The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation funds the Guggenheim Museums.*The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards grants to scientists, scholars and artists....
fellow, Hoffman is married to MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole
Peter Cole
Peter Cole is an American Jewish poet who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.-Early life:Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981.-Literary career:...
, and in 2011, she and Cole published a book they wrote together, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken /Nextbook), which has been widely praised, with Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
calling it “a small masterpiece” and the Nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
describing it as “a literary jewel whose pages turn like those of a well-paced thriller, but with all the chiseled elegance and flashes of linguistic surprise we associate with poetry.... Sacred Trash has made history both beautiful and exciting.”
Hoffman is formerly the film critic for the Jerusalem Post (1993–2000) and the American Prospect (2000–2002). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, Raritan
Raritan
-Places:*Raritan, New Jersey, a borough in Somerset County*Raritan Township, New Jersey, a township in Hunterdon County*Raritan Bay, a bay between the U.S...
, Bookforum
Bookforum
Bookforum is a New York-based magazine devoted to books and the discussion of literature. It is edited by Albert Mobilio, Chris Lehmann, , and Michael Miller.-History: Bookforum was launched in 1994 as a literary supplement to Artforum...
, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House
Tin House
Tin House is an American literary magazine and book publisher based in Portland, Oregon and New York City. The Tin House magazine was conceived in the summer of 1998 by Portland publisher Win McCormack. He envisioned a journal that would be graphically appealing and free of the stale substance...
, and on the World Service of the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
. She is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small, Jerusalem-based press that publishes the literature of the Levant. Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
and Middlebury College
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...
, and in 2009 was the Franke Fellow at Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
’s Whitney Humanities Center. During the summer of 2011 she was the Distinguished Writer in Non-Fiction at NYU’s McGhee School. She now divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
Works
- House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood ISBN 0767910192
- My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century ISBN 0300164270
- Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (with Peter Cole) ISBN 0805242589
External links
- Author website http://www.ibiseditions.com/adinahoffman
- Interview in Bomb Magazine, with Deborah Baker http://bombsite.com/articles/4702
- Interview on PBS NewsHour, with Jeffrey Brown http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/04/conversation-adina-hoffman-author-of-the-new-biography-of-poet-taha-muhammad-ali.html
- Interview on Radio Times, WHYY, with Peter Cole and Marty Moss-Coane http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2011/05/16/sacred-trash-a-treasure-trove-of-the-cairo-geniza/
- Interview in the Jewish Chronicle, London http://www.thejc.com/arts/books/34496/the-power-wisdom