Winner of the 2024 International Berkshire Prize and named one of Debutiful’s “2026 Debut Poetry Collections You Need to Read,” Song in Tammuz by Avia Tadmor ’18 is forthcoming on October 1, 2026, from Tupelo Press.
Written in conversation with the biblical Book of Ruth, Song in Tammuz explores displacement, migration, loss, and the enduring search for home. Tadmor’s poems span centuries and continents, combining ancestral, scriptural, and personal histories. As described by Ellen Bass, author of Indigo, "From a grandfather in pre-Holocaust Czechoslovakia, to Ruth’s famine-stricken migration from Moab to Judah, to the speaker’s move from Israel to the US, horses, crops, land, rivers, and light provide a language that binds old and new. Tadmor eloquently captures the paradox of exile."
Tadmor employs a range of literary forms—from footnotes and dictionary definitions to lyrical, elegiac, and ekphrastic fragments—as speakers reflect on past and present events and redefine their relationships to themselves and their home. Her poems ask how language contributes to othering, what agency exists within inherited linguistic structures, and whether revolutionary messages require reworked, inclusive forms of discourse.
"Song in Tammuz is stunningly tuned to the frequency of loss—loss of beloveds, of homelands, of identity born places," shares Farnaz Fatemi, author of Sister Tongue. "Tadmor's collection reminds me that poetry, in its willingness to pay such attention, enacts love—miles and oceans be damned."
Avia Tadmor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, The New Republic, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Tadmor has received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Previously, she taught writing at Columbia University, where she directed the Columbia Artist/Teachers program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in New York City. Currently, she is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.
Song in Tammuz is available now for preorder.
