Books By Alan Kaufman - Author

Poet, editor, writer, and painter Alan Kaufman was born and raised in the Bronx, earning a BA at City College of New York. In 1977 he moved to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces. After studying fiction in the MFA program at Columbia University, he relocated to San Francisco, where he helped build the community of performance poets at Cafe Babar and participated in the 1993 San Francisco Poets Strike. In addition to his involvement with the Spoken Word community, Kaufman has also been a central figure in the Jewish countercultural movement, co-editing It's the Jews! A Celebration of New Jewish Visions (1995, with Danny Shot) and editing the magazine Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution. Influenced by Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski, Kaufman writes free verse and spoken word poems that often engage themes of spirituality, identity, and cultural memory. He is the author of the poetry collection Who Are We? (1998), the novel Matches (2005) and the memoir Jew Boy (2000). His reviews appear widel