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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

New England Patriot

From The American Conservative, my appreciation of the decentralist Republican (yes, they do exist) John McClaughry of Vermont.
February 14, 2014

Room with Askew

Just finished reading a beautifully written, if unsettling, comic gem: The Disaster Artist, an account of the making of the cult movie The Room, by Room costar Greg Sestero and…
February 7, 2014

Flannery Will Get You Everywhere

Superb essay by Dana Gioia--keynote speaker at September's Front Porch Republic conference--on the Catholic writer in America today.
December 9, 2013

Gardnering at Night, Again

Anyone blessed enough to be within shouting distance of Batavia, New York, this Saturday, October 26, at 8 pm is invited to drop by the Pok-a-Dot, venerable and funky diner,…
October 24, 2013

Piercing Hawkeye

"I love Old October so/I can't bear to see her go," sang the Hoosier Poet of this most resplendent and melancholy month. Among the gifts this October brings is the…
October 14, 2013

Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

From The American Conservative, my review of Jesse Walker's terrific new book The United States of Paranoia.
October 11, 2013

It’s Up to You Not to Heed the Call Up

During the First World War, the Kansas Socialist Kate Richards O'Hare was thrown into prison for violating Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act. Her crime? Telling a North Dakota audience that their…
September 11, 2013

Commons Sense

Jay Walljasper--citizen of Minneapolis, former editor of Utne Reader, and among America's most insightful and humane observers of urban places--is sharing via free e-book his latest, How to Design Our…
July 23, 2013

Threefer Monday

Herewith links to three great tunes responding to America's wars: "Glad to Be Home" by Charles Smith and Jeff Cooper (a Deep Soul gem via Clark Stooksbury); "Gettysburg" by Janie…
July 8, 2013

It’s the Time of the Season

Baseball, poetry, Frederick Exley, death.
June 30, 2013

Green Mountain Cinema

From Orion, my profile of Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven.
June 28, 2013

The War Comes Home

This Friday, June 28, Copperhead, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of a Harold Frederic novella, opens in about 70 cities. A second wave of openings washes across the…
June 26, 2013