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Alan Kaufman is an American novelist, memoirist and poet who was instrumental in the development of the Spoken Word movement in literature. He is the author of the memoir Jew Boy, the novel Matches, and is listed as editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, a landmark volume that introduced readers to an entirely new and largely hidden vein of American poetry.

He is also listed as co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, alongside Barney Rosset and Neil Ortenberg.

Kaufman's restless quest for Jewish identity has taken him from the frontlines of the Israeli-Arab conflict to the Dachau Concentration Camp; from the streets of New York to the San Francisco underground. The Bronx-born son of a Holocaust survivor as well as an Israeli army veteran, Kaufman reports from the visceral core of the modern Jewish experience.

Kaufman is also the award-winning editor of many anthologies, including The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, was recently reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. His anthology, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry The final entry of the Outlaw anthologies trilogy, The Outlaw Bible of American Essays, is scheduled to appear on bookshelves during the Fall of 2006.

Kaufman has taught in the graduate and undergraduate schools of the Academy of Art University and in writing workshops in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Partisan Review, Tel Aviv Review, San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Kaufman himself has been widely anthologized, most recently in "Nothing Makes You Free: Writings From Descendants of Holocaust Survivors" (WW Norton).

Alan Kaufman's Matches was published by Little, Brown and Company in the Fall of 2005, and was published in the United Kingdom by Constable and Robinson the following year.

His critically-acclaimed memoir — Jew Boy — was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Kaufman has been compared to such figures as Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Jean Genet and Henry Miller. Renowned Artisan David Mamet has called Kaufman's recently released novel Matches, about Israeli soldiers, "an extraordinary war novel," and Dave Eggers has written that "there is more passion here then you see in twenty other books combined". Ruth Prawer has praised Kaufman's memoir, Jew Boy as "astonishing...a grand epic of a memoir", while the San Francisco Chronicle called it a "classic coming of age story."