Ruchama King Feuerman was born in Nashville, grew up in Virginia and Maryland, and when she was seventeen, bought a one-way ticket to Israel to seek her spiritual fortune. Seven Blessings (St. Martin’s Press), her celebrated first novel about match-making, earned her the praise of the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News, and Kirkus Reviews dubbed her "the Jewish Jane Austen." She wrote her second novel, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist, with the help of grants from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and it will be published in September 2013 by NYRB Lit, a new e-book series from the New York Review of Books devoted to publishing contemporary books of literary merit from around the world. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous places, including the New York Times, and she is a winner of the 2012 Moment Fiction contest, judged by the novelist Walter Mosley.