Online: Online discussion with Alan Kaufman

Please join us July 9th at 7pm Eastern time, as we host celebrated author Alan Kaufman, who will be reading and discussing his work, inspirations, dreams and plans. Now a San Francisco resident, Alan was a long-time East Villager, and our neighborhood has had a major influence on his work. 

To join this online discussion, please register below with your email address, and we'll send you the meeting link before the program begins. 

Alan will be discussing:

Jew Boy. Kaufman’s very first, frank and affecting memoir about growing up in New York City and being the son of a Holocaust survivor, the boy’s desperate attempts to escape his history through brawling, bloody contact sports, alcohol abuse and cross-country hitchhiking. 

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, this exuberant manifesto includes lives of the poets, on-the-scene testimony, seminal underground articles never before collected, photographs of clubs and cafes, interviews, and, above all, the poems. It brings readers the words, visions, and extravagant lives of bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers.

The Berlin Woman, is a new kind of no-holds barred love story of Lena and Nathan (both children of Holocaust survivors), whose paths cross at a book conference. Their affair becomes a high-stakes reckless game of jealousy, rivalling ambitions, gender conflict, political combat and artistic outrage.

Alan Kaufman, a poet, editor, award winning writer, and painter. He has published memoirs, novels, poetry, and is the editor of "Outlaw" anthologies: The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,  The Outlaw Bible of American Art, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (co-edited with Barney Rosset), The Outlaw Bible of American Essays and The New Generation. He has written for numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Salon, Evergreen Review, Partisan Review and The Jerusalem Post.

Kaufman is a member of PEN American Center, and is a writer-in-residence in The New York Public Library's  Frederick Lewis Allen Room. His papers and manuscripts are on deposit in the Special Collections Library of the University of Delaware and he is profiled in the Europa Biographical Reference Series.

His own work has been included in the anthologies ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994, edited by Muguel Algarin, Bob Holman, and Nicole Blackman) and Nothing Makes You Free: Writings from Descendants of Holocaust Survivors (1993, edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet).

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.