Ayelet Tsabari

MFA (Guelph U)

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Award for Nonfiction and winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir. Essays from the book have won several awards including a National Magazine Award and a Western Magazine Award. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and was long listed to the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The book was also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick, a Kirkus Reviews’ Best Debut Fiction of 2016, and has been published internationally. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Foreign Policy, The Forward, and The National Post. She teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction and at Tel Aviv University.

Selected Publications

Books

• The Art of Leaving, HarperCollins
• The Best Place on Earth, HarperCollins

Anthologies

• “Bad Jew, Good Jew,” Body and Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers, Caitlin Press
• “Yemeni Soup and Other Recipes,” Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food
• “The Marrying Kind,” Love Me True, Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups and Downs of Marriage, Caitlin Press
• “The Marrying Kind,” Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine
• “Soldiers,” Wherever I Find Myself, Stories by Canadian Immigrant Women, Caitlin Press
• “You and What Army,” Slice Me Some Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Creative Nonfiction

Essays

• A Lesser Wife (an excerpt from The Art of Leaving), Tablet, Winter 2019
• Yemeni Soup and Other Recipes, (an excerpt from The Art of Leaving), Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2019
• A Simple Girl, (an excerpt from The Art of Leaving), Paper Brigade, Winter 2018
• Doppelganger or Aya and Me, Jewish Book Council, Spring 2019
• Running on Blueberries, Little Fiction Big Truths, January 2014

Essays on Writing

• Why I Chose to Write in English, Literary Hub, March 2016
• Writing Place, Writing Home, author Gail Anderson Dargatz’s blog, July 2014
• How to Make a Cream Sauce, Event’s Notes on Writing issue, June 2013
• On Writing True Stories, 49th Shelf, March 2013

Op-Eds

• The Art of Returning, The Globe and Mail, April 2019
• How The Mighty Have Fallen, A Tribute to Amos Oz, Foreign Policy, December 2018
• It’s Time Israel Believed the Victims in the Yemenite Babies Affair, The Forward, July 2016
• How Ronit Elkabetz Gave Mizrahi Women Like Me Permission To Dream Big, The Forward, April 2016
• Mizrahi Artists Are Here to Incite a Culture War, The Forward, March 2016
• What Nobody Tells You, The Afterword, The National Post, March 2013
• Torn Between Two Lovers, The Afterword, The National Post, March 2013
• What Kind of Jew Are You, Anyway?, The Afterword, The National Post, March 2013
• How to Lose Friends and Alienate Readers, The Afterword, The National Post, March 2013

Short Fiction

• Green, CBC Prize Shortlist, April 2018
• Knives, Tablet, January 2018

Interests

The craft of writing; diverse storytelling; oral histories; women’s narratives, Mizrahi identity and history; Yemeni Jewish history and culture; translation and writing in a second language; lyric essays