Debra Kaufman grew up in various small towns throughout the Midwest, with deep roots in Gridley, Illinois, and has lived in North Carolina with her family for over thirty years. She has worked as a detasseler, waitress, newspaper correspondent, editor, and as the journals editorial manager at Duke University Press. She has served on various nonprofit committees and boards and serves as an editor for the online journal One and on the board of directors of the Paul Green Foundation. She is a member of the Black Socks Poets, the Greensboro Playwrights Forum, The Dramatists Guild, and the International Conference of Women Playwrights.
Debra’s latest collection of poetry is Outwalking the Shadow (Redhawk Publications 2023). She is also the author of God Shattered (Jacar 2019), Delicate Thefts (Jacar 2015), The Next Moment (Jacar 2010), A Certain Light (Emrys 2001), and the chapbooks Moon Mirror Whiskey Wind (Pudding House 2009), Still Life Burning, winner of the Kinloch Rivers Poetry Competition (South Carolina Poetry Society 1996), and Family of Strangers (Nightshade 1990).
Debra’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Southern Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Poetry East, North Carolina Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Broadkill Review, and Tar River Review, and in several anthologies, including Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont (University of North Carolina 2010), The Sound of Poets Cooking (Jacar 2010); Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry (Carolina Academic Press 1999), and The Art and Craft of Poetry (Writers Digest Books 1994). Her poems have won prizes from such organizations as the North Carolina Writers’ Network, the North Carolina Women Writers Conference, the North Carolina Poetry Society, Emrys Press, the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Independent, WUNC-FM’s Radio Poets, and the Triad Writers Group. Her poem “To Be Emma Bovary” won the North Carolina Literary Review‘s 2015 James Applewhite Poetry Prize.
Debra’s plays have been produced throughout North Carolina and elsewhere. She curated and produced Illuminated Dresses, monologues by women exploring identity and clothing, at Burning Coal Theatre in 2019. Her play Harbor Hope was produced at Common Ground Theatre in Durham, NC. Her one-act play Variations on a Dream was selected as one of Burning Coal Theatre’s New Works series; What You Inherit won The ArtsCenter’s New Plays Rising award and was produced there; and Like Candlelight Draws Smoke was produced at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women through the North Carolina Writers’ Network Outreach Program as well as at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro, NC. She won a North Carolina Arts Council playwriting scholarship in 1997.
Debra recently adapted Johnny Johnson, Paul Green’s 1936 antiwar play, for the Paul Green Foundation. Her essay about that adaptation appears in the forthcoming anthology Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright, edited by Georgann Eubanks and Margaret Bauer (Blair, 2024).
Debra has taught many creative writing workshops for children and adults, including in Durham’s Creative Arts in the Public Schools program, at High Point University’s Phoenix Festival, in libraries, for writers’ groups, for Our Stories in Focus, a public arts and history collaboration sponsored by the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro and the UNC Humanities Program, and Writing to Heal, with Melissa Hassard. She received a Central Piedmont Regional Artists Hub Program grant in 2010, which made possible the development of this web site, and with Melissa Hassard, received the Hub grant in 2017 to teach Writing to Heal workshops in a five-county area.
Interviews
Artist Soapbox: Mindfulness, Intention, and Process
Archive.org: Interview by Paul Dudenhefer
Triggerfish: I Followed Him into the Woods
Web design by Danny Krawiec. Development of this web site was made possible with support from the North Carolina Arts Council and the partnering arts councils of the Central Piedmont Regional Artists Hub Program.