YONI GELERNTER is a writer from New Haven. He was raised and educated in the Chabad Lubavitch movement, a sect of Hasidic Judaism to which he belonged until late adolescence. As an undergraduate at Binghamton University, he was mentored by Alexi Zentner and Kevin Oakes. He received his MFA in Fiction from the Programs in Writing at UC-Irvine, where he was mentored by Michelle Latiolais and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and studied under Percival Everett. While working on his debut novel, Gelernter worked in Austin, Texas variously as a ghostwriter, an English teacher in a private Muslim high school, a community college professor, and a corporate research analyst. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Baffler, Mississippi Review (where his story “Clef/Key” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize), Ninth Letter, and Santa Monica Review. Essays are forthcoming in The Drift and Hyperreal Film Journal.

AUTHOR WEBSITE: YONI GELERNTER