Marisa Handler -- writer, singer-songwriter, teacher, and speaker -- is the author of the memoir Loyal to the Sky, which won a 2008 Nautilus Gold Award for world-changing books. Her essays, journalism, fiction, and poetry have appeared in The Sun, Tikkun, Orion, Salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, Zeek, and other publications. She received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received numerous fellowships including a Fulbright in Creative Writing. She teaches Creative Writing at the California Institute for Integral Studies and is currently at work on a novel and her next album. Learn more at www.marisahandler.com.
Blood and Honey
My parents ran a sweet shop, and as a child I worked with them after school, rolling and shaping the dough, blanching and grinding the almonds, placing tiny silver balls of sugar in the center of heart-shaped mkhabez. They came to Algiers from a village in the Kabyle when I was only a year old....
