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Bill Kauffman

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt), Ain’t My America (Metropolitan), Look Homeward, America (ISI), and Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books). His next book, Upstaters, is due from SUNY Press in 2026. He is a columnist for The American Conservative and The Spectator World. Bill wrote the screenplay for the 2013 feature film Copperhead. He is a founding editor of Front Porch Republic and has served as a legislative assistant to Senator Pat Moynihan, editor for various magazines and publishers, and vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, a professional baseball team that was euthanized by Major League Baseball. He lives with his wife Lucine in his native Genesee County, New York.

Articles by Bill Kauffman

It Started with a Dis…

The Empire did not fall the day Front Porch Republic rose. But in 15 years FPR has done much more than simply add weight to the human scale. It has…
March 12, 2024

Bruce Langhorne, RIP

Bruce Langhorne, best known as the inspiration for Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" but best loved (by me, anyway) for his extraordinary score for Peter Fonda's 1971 acid Western The…
April 22, 2017

The Elector Defector

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY -- As rumors of rogue electors spike the December air, I offer this piece from 2001, which is included in my Poetry Night at the Ballpark and…
December 6, 2016

So Long, Leonard Cohen

One of the pleasures of living near the Canadian border is Canuck radio, which due to local content regulations (the good protectionism) plays a steady diet (varying greatly in nutritional…
November 11, 2016

Deliver us from Nowhere

The perils of placeless populism, from The American Conservative.
November 7, 2016

Back There Where the Past Was

From The American Conservative, memories of the Crooked Lake Review gang.
October 27, 2016

Dy-No-Mite!

Minnesota's second literary Nobelist is the subject of The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and Justice, Power and Sin, a perceptive book by our porchite colleague Jeff Taylor. Herewith…
October 13, 2016

Twenty Years Now, Where’d They Go?

The Future of Freedom Foundation has reprinted "The Empire versus Little America," my speech from what was, in a parallel universe, the epochal 2010 conference that begat the peace group…
September 10, 2016

Pass the Biscuits

From Reason, Jesse Walker, ace archivist/alchemist of Americana, on the toothless but entertaining populist Texan Pappy O'Daniel.
February 25, 2016

Back to Ohio

From the New Oxford Review, Part Two of Will Hoyt's survey of eastern Ohio...featuring a triple play of Traci Lords, Clement Vallandigham, and H.H. Richardson!
February 12, 2016

If I Were a Carpenter/And You Lived in Cadiz….

From the New Oxford Review, Will Hoyt on his move from Berkeley to eastern Ohio.
December 14, 2015

The Answer, My Friend

From The American Conservative, my thoughts on FPR contributor Jeff Taylor's new book on Bob Dylan.
November 5, 2015