Rachel Kaufman is a poet, teacher, and PhD Candidate in Latin American and Jewish History at UCLA.
Her work explores diasporic memory, transmission, and violence and argues for the power of poetry as historical method. Her dissertation places conversas in their colonial context in New Spain, examining global trade networks, the transatlantic slave trade, and cross-community cultural and religious exchange amongst women. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on and in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jabberwock Review, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, Comedia Performance, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and Colonial Latin American Review. Her article, received the 2025 CLAH Vanderwood Prize and 2025 CLAR Pease Prize. The author of poetry collection, (2021), she was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence, a 2025 Willapa Bay AiR poet-in-residence, and a Fulbright-Hays Scholar.