Bio

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, historian, and teacher pursuing a PhD in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her poetic and historical work explore diasporic memory and the ways in which literary and historical works transmit the past, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her chapbook, And after the fire, won the 2020 JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize and is grounded in the language and myth of the Talmud. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, and Diagram, and is forthcoming in Comedia Performance: Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. She is a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer Residency artist.