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Anndee Hochman

Contributor

BSR Contributor Since February 3, 2014

Anndee Hochman (she/her pronouns) writes essays, articles, and reviews for an eclectic range of publications; she also teaches poetry and creative nonfiction to children and adults. She lives in Mt. Airy, but you can find her online at www.anndeehochman.com.

Anndee Hochman is a writer from Philadelphia. Anndee Hochman's essays, articles, and reviews have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Huffington Post, Newsworks.org, Literary Mama, and Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. She writes frequently about community, spirituality, art, health, lesbian/gay/transgender issues, and the permutations of the American family. She is the author of two books: Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador USA) and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home (The Eighth Mountain Press), named one of the 100 most important feminist books of the 20th century by Sojourner magazine. Anndee has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Leeway Foundation. For 20 years, she has taught poetry and creative nonfiction to children, teens, and adults in a variety of settings including schools, senior centers, programs for at-risk youth, and a fishing village on Mexico's Pacific coast. She lives in Mt. Airy, but you can also find her at www.anndeehochman.com.

By this Author

104 results
Page 1
A way out of the basement. (Photo via Shutterstock, by Igor Normann.)

The mixologist’s daughter: raising a glass to reinvention, again

Happy hours, then and now
Over the course of almost 30 years, some things change and some don’t—and Anndee Hochman, from writing to bartending and back again, learns that personal reinventions don’t have to shake the foundations of family.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
Poet and memoirist Elaine Terranova. (Photo by Millie L. Berg.)

‘The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir’ by Elaine Terranova

Facets of family life
Poet Elaina Terranova has more in common with her father than she knew. ‘The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter’ explores power, fear, and longing in a Philadelphia Orthodox Jewish family. Anndee Hochman reviews.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Reviews 5 minute read
Identity is complicated and contextual, whether we’re raising our hands on screen or in person. (Image by Melita, via Adobe Stock.)

When we can’t meet in person, do we need a shorthand for our identity?

Invisible in the Zoomiverse
It’s hard enough to navigate our identities IRL. What happens when we’re reduced to a Zoom box or other distanced communication? Anndee Hochman considers.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
The masks? They’re everywhere. (Photo by Anndee Hochman.)

After a year of pandemic life, how do we measure the distance between then and now?

A year ago…
How have we weathered the last year? Let us count the ways. Births. Zooms. Funerals. The hugs we missed. Anndee Hochman is still realizing that anything can happen.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
This nest is an apt emblem for Saunier’s poetry. (Image courtesy of Terrapin Books.)

‘A Cartography of Home’ by Hayden Saunier

When we were still a place
A new poetry collection from Hayden Saunier weaves Pennsylvania’s natural world with its mini-marts and hotels, exploring possibility, loss, compound perspectives, and calls to customer service. Anndee Hochman reviews.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Reviews 5 minute read
Renting a Torah actually isn't difficult, even in a pandemic: the author and her cousin, Scout, scan the parchment for the right chapter and verse. (Photo by Milt Spivack.)

What happens when the stress of the pandemic leads to a surprising yes?

Bring on the Zoomitzvah
Plan and lead a family bat mitzvah in four days? Anndee Hochman is a writer, not a rabbi, but something about the COVID-19 pandemic made her say yes to her cousin's request.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
The author, her partner, and their housemate bless challah—made from a family recipe—on a recent Friday. (Image courtesy of the author.)

Here’s how my Jewish great-grandparents’ Philly bakery lives in me today

The food chain
While braiding and baking the Friday challah, Anndee Hochman imagines her great-grandmother’s journey from Russia. What did she carry with her? Are those things alive today?
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 4 minute read
Nowadays, the ways we show kindness have shifted. (Photo by Anndee Hochman.)

Deep in the pandemic, can a neighborhood’s character survive?

Still the one who walks
Before a virus turned the world upside down, Anndee Hochman was a familiar figure to her neighbors as she walked Germantown Avenue. What has changed? What is perennial, even in a pandemic?
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
How will your reading stack look after poets, playwrights, and novelists tackle the coronavirus? (Photo by Anndee Hochman.)

Even in a pandemic, there are some questions only storytellers can answer

Surviving on stories; stories on surviving
Stephen King wrote ‘The Stand’ and Camus wrote ‘The Plague.’ They’re not the first or the last to mine rampant sickness for human meaning. Anndee Hochman wonders how our storytellers will make sense of COVID-19.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 4 minute read
What would you have done if you had known the moment before the 1986 Challenger disaster? (Image courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

When disaster is about to strike, is it a gift not to know?

The moment before
What were you doing in mid-March, when the realization hit you that this pandemic was going to derail the world? Was it like other moments before disaster struck? Anndee Hochman considers.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
Illustration by Hannah Kaplan for Broad Street Review.

Are authors bound to write only within their own identities?

Rendering lives that aren’t yours
Writer Anndee Hochman—a queer Jewish white woman, the descendant of immigrants—grapples with which stories are really hers to tell.
Anndee Hochman Illustration by Hannah Kaplan

Anndee Hochmanand Illustration by Hannah Kaplan

Essays 5 minute read
What are you afraid of? Has it changed in recent days? (Photo by Sasha Hochman.)

Here’s what happened in my 2nd-grade classroom as COVID-19 became a pandemic

Poetry in the time of coronavirus
“We’re not closing,” a local K-5 principal told teaching writer-in-residence Anndee Hochman. But things changed more quickly than anyone could believe.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 5 minute read
What do you do when it feels like you’re balancing an upside-down world? Kathy Ruttenberg’s ‘Topsy Turvy’ was part of an installation between New York's Barnard College and Columbia University titled 'Dreams Awake.' (Photo by Anndee Hochman.)

A Barnard College parent in Philly grapples with the death of Tessa Majors

A mother in the aftermath
News of a fatal stabbing in Morningside Park rocked Anndee Hochman’s family—her own daughter is a classmate of the victim. How do parents and their children cope with the nightmare of violence?
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Essays 4 minute read
Part memoir, part interrogation: ‘Even If Your Heart Would Listen.’ (Image courtesy of SparkPress.)

‘Even If Your Heart Would Listen,’ by Elise Schiller

Writing from wounds
‘Even If Your Heart Would Listen,’ exploring the loss of an adult child to addiction, is both memoir and an indictment of how our healthcare system is failing us. Anndee Hochman reviews.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Articles 4 minute read
How much does it hurt? The cover of ‘Cursed.’ (Image courtesy of Charlesbridge Publishing.)

‘Cursed’ by Karol Ruth Silverstein

Anything but perfect
We’re used to the arcs of YA novels like ‘Cursed.’ What’s new is a realistic protagonist navigating high school and a serious chronic illness. Anndee Hochman reviews.
Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman

Articles 4 minute read