M. M. Kaufman was born in California and raised in Augusta, Georgia where she has recently returned after many years away in Atlanta, Indonesia, NYC, and New Orleans. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Agnes Scott College in 2012. While there she studied creative writing under Amber Dermont, Rachel Trousdale, and Natasha Trethewey. After graduation she traveled to the Maluku islands in Indonesia to teach English as a Fulbright Scholar.
Kaufman earned her MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. While there she studied under M.O. Walsh, Fredrick Barton, Barb Johnson, Joanna Leake, and Carolyn Hembree. During this time she served as associate and then managing editor of Bayou Magazine. In 2017, she received an Honorable Mention for the Vassar Miller Poetry Award given by UNO. Upon graduation in 2018, she was awarded the Fredrick Barton Service Award for her work with Bayou Magazine.
From 2015 to 2022, she worked for the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival and Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival in social media and publicity. She is currently the Managing Editor and social media coordinator for Rejection Letters where many of her photographs are also featured. She is a curator and social media manager for Micro Podcast where she has also conducted many author interviews. She worked as a fiction reader for No Contact Magazine and hosted a weekly book talk on their Instagram Live called “Morning Brew with MM.”
Kaufman placed 3rd in the New Orleans Public Library’s 2021 Winter Writing contest. In 2021, she attended the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference for the first time under Tiphanie Yanique. She was recently named a finalist in the 2021 Miller Audio Prize put on by The Missouri Review. The recording of “Clarity,” originally published in Hobart can be heard on The Miller Aud-Cast. In 2022, her novel excerpt was a finalist for Uncharted Magazine’s SciFi/Fantasy First Chapter Contest.
M. M. Kaufman has work published with and forthcoming from Slush Pile Magazine, Ellipsis, Memoir Mixtapes, Tuck Magazine, The Normal School, Hobart, Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Orangeblush Zine, (mac)ro(mic), Our Name is Amplify, HAD: Hobart After Dark, Daily Drunk Magazine, Olney Magazine, The Miller Aud-cast, Pine Hills Review, and Maudlin House.
M.M. Kaufman 