Gella Schweid-Fishman is an American-born graduate of the Yiddish schools of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. For fifty years, she has taught Yiddish language, literature, and culture in primary schools and at the university level at Yeshiva College and Stern College, part of Yeshiva University. Her first book of poems, In Shtile shoen [In Quiet Hours], was published in 2002.