Shirley Kaufman

Shirley Kaufman was born in 1923 in Seattle

Shirley Kaufman was born in Seattle on June 5, 1923, to parents who had emigrated from Poland. Her mother, Nellie Freeman, was a homemaker. Her father, Joseph Pincus, sold furniture and later made and sold it wholesale.

She finished James A. Garfield High School in 1940. In 1944 she earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1946 she married Bernard Kaufman, Jr., a cardiologist, and they had 3 daughters.

When her daughters were teenagers, she joined the creative writing program at San Francisco State University and began writing full time. Her first book, The Floor Keeps Turning, came out in 1970 and won a first book prize in Pittsburgh. Gold Country followed in 1973.

After her divorce she married Hillel Daleski, a professor of English literature, and moved to Jerusalem in 1973. She translated Hebrew poetry into English, including work by Abba Kovner, Amir Gilboa and Meir Wieseltier. She also co-edited a bilingual anthology of Hebrew poetry by women, published in 1999.

Her poems often dealt with family ties, women's lives, violence and Jewish identity. She died of Alzheimer's disease on September 25, 2016, in San Francisco.