Merissa Nathan Gerson is a freelance nonfiction and fiction writer. Her written work focuses on sex, sexuality and Judaism as well as trauma, post-war reconciliation, and intergenerational repercussions of war. She was the intergenerational trauma consultant to Amazon's hit show Transparent and has writing featured in The New York Times, Playboy Magazine, The Atlantic, Elle.com, Tablet Magazine, Lilith Magazine, and many others. She teaches about sex and religion and the inheritance of trauma and memory.
Merissa holds a BA in American Culture Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado and most recently an MA in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She spent a year studying Torah at the PARDES institute for Jewish Studies in 2010 and is a Sivananda certified yoga teacher. From 2006-2008 she trained intensively in the Shambalah lineage of Shamatha meditation and in 2013 she attended the ALEPH Jewish Renewal Kallah retreat where she studied with Rabbi Shefa Gold, Rabbi David Ingber, and others.
In addition to writing and performing, she is a local educator and has worked with organizations such as Facing History, Facing Ourselves, The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Jewrotica, The Collaborative, Moishe House, and Boston 3G to facilitate workshops on Judaism, Sex, Trauma and more. She founded www.KenMeansYes.org in 2018 to address the need for consent education in Jewish spaces. Her greater intention is to provide new and innovative tools to aid the healing of post-war intergenerational trauma in the coming generations.
