Boomer and The Present - Alan Kaufman

Alan Kaufman is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Jew Boy, the novel Matches, called "an extraordinary war novel," by David Mamet, and a book of poetry, Who Are We?. He is the award-winning editor of several anthologies, the most recent of which, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, was reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review.

Other volumes in Kaufman's Outlaw anthology series are The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays. His work has appeared in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, Partisan Review, Tikkun andTel Aviv Review, among other publications, as well as in many Web 'zines, including Tattoo Jew, of which he is the editor.

A former editor of Jewish Frontier, he is the founder and editor of the controversial magazine Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution and has performed extensively as a spoken-word poet in the United States and internationally. Kaufman has been widely anthologized, most recently in Nothing Makes You Free: Writings From Descendents of Holocaust Survivors (WW Norton). A member of PEN American Center, he is also profiled in the Europa Biographical Reference Series.

He holds American, French and Israeli citizenship and lives in San Francisco. A lay ordained Zen practitioner, he is also one of the founders and Dean of the Free University of San Francisco. Which was recently compared to the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Kaufman's papers and manuscripts are on deposit in the Special Collections Library of the University of Delaware. Well-established in his literary career, Kaufman is now gaining recognition as a painter of haunting portraits.