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, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was long listed to the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Review Best Book 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, has won a National Magazine Award and was shortlisted for CBC Short Story Prize.
Selected Publications
Books
- Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language, co-edited with Eufemia Fantetti and Leonarda Carranza (Book*hug Press, 2021).
- 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
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
