Janet Kauffman

Janet Kauffman (born June 10, 1945)[1] is an American novelist, poet, and mixed media artist who has also been a civil rights, environmental, equal rights, peace, and social justice activist.[2] Explaining her writing to Jean Jackman for a 1989 feature article in the Detroit Free Press, Kauffman said:[3]

You can't be a woman writer today without being a feminist writer, if that means attending to matters of order, matters of power. I think the excitement in fiction today is about changes in defining structure and order. All literature is political. It has to be, even when writers are trying not to make it so.

Formative years

Kauffman was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on June 10, 1945.[4][5]

Raised on a tobacco farm in a predominantly Mennonite community in Lancaster County, she was inspired at an early age by the social justice beliefs held by many of the residents she encountered there. These beliefs were later reflected as themes in her written works and academic lectures, addressing the areas of agricultural pollution, civil and equal rights, climate change, environmental ethics and the risks to ecosystems from the local to global levels, and the preservation of peace.[6]

During her early the early part of her adult academic career, she received training in poetry writing, which led to her becoming a published poet by her mid-thirties.[7] Kauffman then pursued her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Chicago. After completing her dissertation about Theodore Roethke, she was awarded her degree in 1972.[8]

Career and environmental activism

Kauffman subsequently relocated to Michigan, where she became a member of the faculty of Jackson Community College and taught classes in creative writing, feminist studies and literature. During this period of her life, she shifted her writing focus to fiction, and received critical acclaim for her first short story collection, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk. She also served as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan from 1985 to 1986.[9]

A member of the English Department faculty at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti, Michigan, beginning in 1988, she continued to teach there until her retirement in 2008.[8][10]

Since the 1980s, she has owned a farm near Hudson, Michigan, where she was a hay farmer for more than a decade before restoring her property's wetlands and securing a conservation easement. In 2001, she and fellow Hudson farm owner Lynn Henning organized a "tour de manure" to raise the public's awareness about the environmental threats posed by latge-scale, industrial dairy farming operations.[11] In 2019, she donated the majority of her property to the ACRES Land Trust to preserve the grasslands, stream, wetlands, and woods there with the goal of creating an environmental sanctuary for researchers and the general public.[12]

Bibliography

Poetry
Collections
  • Writing Home, with Jerome McGann (Coldwater Press, 1978)
  • The Weather Book (Texas Tech University Press, 1981)
  • Where the World Is (Montparnasse Press, 1988)
  • Five on Fiction (Burning Deck Press, 2004)
  • oh corporeal (Coldwater Press, 2010)

Novels
  • Collaborators (Knopf, 1986)
  • The Body in Four Parts (Graywolf, 1994)
  • Rot (New Issues, 2001)

Short fiction
Collections
  • Places in the World a Woman Could Walk (Knopf, 1983)
  • Obscene Gestures for Women (Knopf, 1989)
  • Characters on the Loose (Graywolf, 1997)
  • Trespassing: Dirt Stories & Field Notes (stories and essays) (Wayne State University Press, 2008)
Stories
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
Machinery 1986 Kauffman, Janet (April 14, 1986). "Machinery". The New Yorker. Vol. 62, no. 8. pp. 32–34.

References
  1. Hostetler, Ann Elizabeth. A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry, p. 41.
  2. Jackman, Jean. "She'd rather disturb than console." Detroit, Michigan: Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B (subscription required).
  3. Jackman, "She'd rather disturb than console," Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B.
  4. Hostetler, A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry, p. 41.
  5. Jackman, "She'd rather disturb than console," Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B.
  6. Jackman, "She'd rather disturb than console," Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B.
  7. Jackman, "She'd rather disturb than console," Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B.
  8. "Janet Kauffman at emich.edu". Archived from the original on 2007-11-11.
  9. Jackman, "She'd rather disturb than console," Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B.
  10. Musial, Robert. "Fans raise a toast to a literary wit." Detroit, Michigan: Detroit Free Press, August 18, 1993, p. 5A (subscription required).
  11. Arrigo, Barbara. "Tour will open eyes, and noses, to mega-dairy-farm threat." Detroit, Michigan: Detroit Free Press, June 2, 2001, p. 12A (subscription required).
  12. Jackman, "She'd rather disturb than console," Detroit Free Press, November 15, 1989, p. 3B.

Sources
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