About the Authors

Judith Arcana’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the United States, England, Canada and Denmark, including in Prairie Hearts, Calyx, Motherwork, BRIDGES, Passager, and 13th Moon. Her most recent book is Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography (Univeristy of Illinois Press). She is currently working on a poetry collection.

Robin Bernstein is the author of Terrible, Terrible!, a Jewish feminist children’s book, and the co-editor of Generation Q, a finalist for a Lambda Literary award. She is also an editor of Bridges, a journal of Jewish feminist culture and politics. Her work appears in Tristan Taormino and Jewelle Gomez’s Best Lesbian Erotica 1997 and many other anthologies. This story is excerpted from a novel in progress entitled Tammy Wexler Needs Your Help!

Gayle Brandeis is a writer and dancer living in Riverside, California, with her husband, Matt McGunigle, and their two children, Arin and Hannah. She is currently working on her fourth novel, and she recently completed Fruitflesh: Living and Writing in a Woman’s Body, a body awareness and creativity guide for women writers. Her favorite bagel is Jalapeno Cheese.

Cara Bruce lives in San Francisco and is the editor of the e-zine Venus or Vixen? She believes in leaving some things to the imagination.

Harvest Garfinkel is an Ashkenazi/Buddhist/pagan who lives in an unhip part of the San Francisco Bay Area. She had her bat mitzvah in 1960. There were no Catholic boys at the party.

Ariel Hart is the pseudonym of a freelance writer who was born and bred and still lives in Brooklyn. Her various works have appeared in everything from Seventeen magazine to Screw.

Susanna J. Herbert is the pen name of a Nice Jewish Girl (who sometimes writes as Anaiis Juishgrrl). A TV writer/producer, her erotic fiction can be seen in Herotica 4 and Herotica 6. She is dedicated to the laughter and love handed down by a matriarchy of noble Jewish foremothers.

Emma Holly writes for Black Lace in London and has also sold a romanterotic novella to Red Sage Publishing in the United States. She loves all sorts of erotica, especially the sort with a heart.

Erica Jong is author of over twenty-two novels and collections of poetry. The excerpt in this volume is from Any Woman’s Blues and appears courtesy of HarperCollins.

Sarah Leder is a serious Jewish scholar and a scholarly slut. She was happy to discover that her name, Sarah, means princess in Hebrew. She envisions herself as the comedic lesbian S/M branch of Chabad. It is her fervent hope that her efforts might help ignite Jewish souls to burn with the fire of Torah.

Joyce Moye graduated with honors from Cornell University, and then sold furniture, worked for a food corporation, started her own interior design firm, godmothered a National Historic District into existence, and served on two local zoning hearing boards. Married, she has two children and always intended to be a writer when she grew up. At present, she is a sysop on CompuServe’s Erotic Literature Forum. Her agent is shopping her two-book saga of a menage a trois. “The Nanny of Ravenscroft” is from a work in progress.

Joan Nestle’s most recent book is A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writing (Cleis Press, 1998). She is co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. “The Gift of Taking” is from A Restricted Country and appears courtesy of Firebrand Books.

Lesléa Newman is the author of many books that explore themes of being a Jew and being a lesbian, including the novel In Every Laugh a Tear and the short story collection A Letter to Harvey Milk. She is also the editor of several books of erotica, including Pillow Talk: Lesbian Stories Between the Covers, The Femme Mystique, and My Lover Is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems. Other recent titles include two books of humor: Out of the Closet and Nothing to Wear and The Little Butch Book.

Marge Piercy is the author of over twenty-four novels and collections of poetry. The piece that appears in this volume is from He, She and It, a futuristic novel set in a Jewish community, and is reprinted courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf.

Carol Queen credits her first Jewish lover with her present comfort with sex; “L’Chaim” is a gift to her, these many years later. Queen is the author of Exhibitionism for the Shy, Real Live Nude Girl, and the erotic novel The Leather Daddy and the Femme.

Stacy Reed is a writer attending graduate school at the University of Houston. She was a full-time journalist and editor for over four years, and holds an honors degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Reed’s erotic fiction has been published in First Person Sexual as well as in Herotica 3, 4, and 5. Her essay “All Stripped Off appears in Whores and Other Feminists.

Elaine Starkman is co-editor with Marsha Lee Berkman of Here I Am: Contemporary Jewish Stories from Around the World (Jewish Publication Society, 1998) and author of Learning to Sit in the Silence: A Journal of Caretaking (Papier-Mache, 1993). She lives in Northern California with her reliable partner of thirty-six years. She is the mother of four adult children and three small grandsons. She teaches at Diablo Valley College part-time and writes poetry.

Claudine Taupin is the pseudonym of a Jewish writer whose work has appeared on the Web and in print publications nationwide. Claudine enjoys spending time with her husband and subverting the status quo whenever possible.