Halah author: Maya Tevet Dayan
Maya Tevet Dayan is the author of a novel (One Thousand Years To Wait – 2011) and three books of poetry: Let There Be Evening. Let There Be Chaos (2015), Wherever We Float, That’s Home (2018) and Coping Mechanisms (2021). She publishes literary-feminist essays in the Israeli magazine “Ha’aretz”, and is a prominent voice in Israeli culture and thought today. Tevet Dayan is the recipient of the Israeli Prime Minister award for literature for 2018 and an honorable mention from the Kugel Poetry Prize for 2016. English translations of her poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Rattle Magazine, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, The New Quarterly, Literary Review of Canada and other venues.
In the middle of this, I also left behind / my mother, forty-six years old, / still menstruating, still falling in love, / her long hair gathered in a sloppy hair pin, / making family dinners