Biography
Anna Belle Kaufman is a poet, artist and writer. Her poems and Pushcart-nominated essays have appeared in The Sun, Utne Reader, and the Journal of Art in Psychotherapy. Her poetry’s clarity, beauty and wisdom are evident in “Cold Solace,” an elegy for her mother that centres on honey cake—often eaten at Rosh Hashanah as a symbol of hope for a sweet year to come. Kaufman, who became an art psychotherapist after her son died of AIDS at age five, also began making sculpture in containers that “held and protected the tenderness and pain of my grief.” In her recent project, “Sacred Objects,” she’s fashioned a series of reliquary houses that contain poems by mystics of the West and the East, “a place—I hope—of stillness, peace, and inspiration.” Kaufman lives in the country in Northern California with her second husband, dog, and two pet goats.