Shirley Kaufman

Shirley Kaufman was born in Seattle on June 5, 1923, to a family of Polish immigrants. She received a BA in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1944 and an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1967. She immigrated to Jerusalem in 1973.

Kaufman published Ezekiel’s Wheels (2009), Threshold (2003), and Roots in the Air: New & Selected Poems (1996) with Copper Canyon Press. Her Selected Poems, translated into Hebrew by Aharon Shabtai, with Dan Pagis and Dan Miron, was published by the Bialik Institute in Jerusalem in 1995. Her first volume of poetry, The Floor Keeps Turning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), won the First Book Award of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh.

Kaufman has also published several books in translation from the Hebrew of Abba Kovner and Amir Gilboa, and from the Dutch of Judith Herzberg. Kaufman’s translations of the poems of Meir Wieseltier, The Flower of Anarchy (University of California Press, 2003), won a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

After her husband’s death in 2011, Kaufman returned to San Francisco, where she remained until her own death on September 25, 2016.