Adina Hoffman

Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman's books include House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and won the UK’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year. In 2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published her Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, which the Los Angeles Times called “brave and often beautiful” and Haaretz described as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” Her Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures appeared in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series and was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography. Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby called it "superb," and said that Hoffman "writes with enormous flair," while Booklist, in a starred review, dubbed it "electrifying." Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the TLS, Raritan, Bookforum, the New York Times, Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. She is formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post. The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Windham Campbell prize, she lives in Jerusalem and New Haven. Author website: http://ibiseditions.com/adinahoffman