LynleyShimat Lys just moved back to New York after five years in Jerusalem, studying Middle Eastern Studies (Palestinian Poetry, Arabic, Hebrew, Pahlavi) at Hebrew University. She works in academic publishing in Non-English article abstracting and indexing. She is studying in the poetry track of the Queens College MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation. Her poetry interests involve African American women poets, plays in verse, and intersections between Israeli and Palestinian poems of place. Her BA is from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature (Hebrew, Russian, English). She is also trained as an archivist and has worked at film archives.