May is Jewish American Heritage Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of poetry and fiction to spotlight all month and year-round. (We publish longer reading lists each month as well—check out our most recent reading list for Jewish American Heritage Month for more books to feature!)
Poetry
Hills Full of Holes by Dan Alter
Fernwood Press | March 7, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-59498-157-9
“Part elegy, part pastoral, part ode to beloved and beleaguered set-asides,” this poetry collection “journeys in widening understandings of injuries to body and land, and their possible recoveries.”
The Animal Is Chemical by Hadara Bar-Nadav
Four Way Books | March 15, 2024
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 978-1-961897-00-7
In this poetry collection, Bar-Nadav “brilliantly draws on her own experience as a medical editor and her family’s history of Holocaust survival to write into the hybrid legacy of Western medicine: part clinical empiricism, part human fallibility and moral bankruptcy.”
What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 by Elana Dykewomon
Sinister Wisdom | October 7, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 978-1-944981-80-8
The poems in this collection “help us understand the contours of sexism, homophobia, racism, and antisemitism.”
The Sky Will Overtake You by Marcia Falk
Scarlet Tanager Books | May 19, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1734531381
According to Jehanne Dubrow, this poetry collection examines “the lyrical responsibilities of the poet: to create meaning and beauty, to grieve what’s lost, and to express gratitude for every fragile, tenuous moment of being human.”
Secular Audacity by Joy Gaines-Friedler
Mayapple Press | April 15, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-952781-26-1
This poetry collection “looks at life through a secular—albeit Jewish—lens, recognizing, even celebrating mystery, awe, joy, humor, justice and injustice without assigning divine authority.”
True Believer by Jeff Kass
Dzanc Books | March 25, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-938603-26-6
In this poetry collection, Kass “intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of good.”
PROTOCOLS: An Erasure by Daniela Naomi Molnar
Ayin Press | June 24, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-961814-23-3
This book-length poem “transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language.”
Freeland by Leigh Sugar
Alice James Books | June 10, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-949944-73-0
According to Edward Hirsch, this debut poetry collection “dramatizes what it’s like to stand on the outside looking in, to be in a relationship with someone who is incarcerated, to live within a love confined by the state.”
Fiction
The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press | March 19, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-954404-23-6
In this trio of novellas, “three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises.”
People Are Talking by Amanda Eisenberg
Three Rooms Press | April 22, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-953103-59-8
In this debut novel, “author Mallory Shepard attends her estranged best friend’s wedding in Austin, where she and six friends try to settle old scores—with unexpected deadly consequences.”
No One’s Leaving by Raki Kopernik
Unsolicited Press | February 4, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 978-1-963115-24-6
In this novel, “a young woman travels through Europe in the late nineties after she learns of her ex-girlfriend’s suicide, whose ghost follows her around.”
Nothing Vast by Moshe Zvi Marvit
Acre Books | October 15, 2024
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
ISBN: 978-1-946724-79-3
This novel is a “sweeping multigenerational tale” that “complicates traditional narratives as it follows two families—one Moroccan, one Polish—filled with Zionists, anti-Zionists, socialists, and reactionaries.”
Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich
Dzanc Books | January 13, 2026
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-938603-51-8
According to Yelena Furman, this novel in verse “brimming with references from Russian and Ukrainian literatures to Alla Pugacheva and the Moscow 1990s gay club scene” is a “poetic disquisition on global history and self-identity.”
Gittel by Laurie Schneider
Regal House Publishing | April 1, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 978-1-64603-551-9
In this children’s novel, “the Borensteins and twelve other Jewish families have left behind the deadly pogroms of Eastern Europe only to find life nearly as harsh in 1911 Mill Creek, Wisconsin.”
A Brutal Design by Zachary C. Solomon
Lanternfish Press | January 30, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-941360-81-1
In this novel, architecture student Samuel Zelnik “receives an unexpected offer of freedom working in the experimental utopian city of Duma.”
