EREZ BITON

Erez Biton is a pioneering and award-winning Israeli poet of North African heritage. Biton immigrated to Israel with his family in 1948 but was blinded by a stray hand grenade at the age of ten. Biton’s five books of poetry, including his most recent work, Blindfolded Landscapes, explore both his North African Jewish heritage and his blindness with exceptional courage, openness and honesty. Recently awarded both the Yehuda Amichai poetry prize and the Bialik lifetime achievement award, Biton is critically celebrated as, “the founding father of a new and significant tradition in the history of Modern Hebrew poetry—Israeli Sephardic poetry,” according to Hannan Hever, the Jacob & Hilda Blaustein Prof of Hebrew Language & Literature at Yale University.