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Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in London on the last night of the Blitz, in 1945 and grew up in Rochester, New York. Karen has Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester. Since 1972 has been in Israel. Karen teaches poetry at Tel Aviv University, chairs the Israel Association of Writers in English (she is among the founders in 1982) and is Vice Chair of Federation of Writers Unions in Israel. Karen Alkalay-Gut published 21 poetry books in English and in Hebrew, more than 60 assays and reviews about literary issues in academic and literature magazines in Israel and abroad, also she has won many literature prizes in Israel and abroad. More than 500 of her poems were published in magazines in Israel and abroad. Karen uses other kinds of art, like plastic art, designing art and more, and combines them in her reading events. Poetry
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“I first read her poems during those manic insomniac nights in Israel, and I recall my initial shock of awareness, the shiver tingle at the back of my neck, that someone else had expressed exactly what I felt: the complexity of emotions that arose from living in this crazy country. It was an awakening for me, a realization that poetry could speak as powerfully as the newspaper headlines, that everyday language could weave together a "prayershawl of words", dedicated to the sanctity of human life and the sacredness of the moment. Alkalay-Gut's poetry transcends boundaries: she enters the mind of the Dizengoff suicide bomber as effortlessly and profoundly as she does that of a Bedouin woman in labor, a Holocaust survivor in Tel Aviv, and an Israeli woman in Munich”. - Ruth Knaffo Setton, Night Reading: Hunger Artists--Voices from Israel, Jewish Family & Life, 2000 “Karen Alkalay-Gut is probably the most prolific and best known Israeli poet writing in English, the moving spirit behind the Israeli Association of Writers in English, and generous in encouraging other writers and creating an audience for English writing in Israel…In My Skin has some flashes of the merry wit that characterizes The Love of Clothes & Nakedness, and, a sign of Alkalay-Gut’s irrepressible spirit”. - Jeffrey M. Green, Jewish Spectator, July 2002 “These RECIPES are cosmopolitan lyrics in a feminist tradition of politicising the personal and personalising the political. The poems are direct and centred in the female body and experience, and there is a particular focus on relationships whether between lovers, parents and children or between friends”. - L Kiew, New Hope International, 1994 |