Bio

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her work explores diasporic memory, transmission, and violence and argues for the power of poetry as historical method. Her dissertation places conversas in their colonial context in New Spain, examining global trade networks and women’s kitchens and living rooms, the transatlantic slave trade, and cross-community cultural and religious exchange amongst women. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the history of the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her chapbook, And after the fire, won the 2020 JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize and emerges from the language and myth of the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on poets.org and in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Jabberwock Review, The Dodge, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, Diagram, The Yale Historical Review, Comedia Performance, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and Colonial Latin America Review. With UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics, she has co-translated several comedias (early modern Spanish plays). She was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence, a 2025 Willapa Bay AiR poet-in-residence, and a Fulbright-Hays Scholar.