Fern Kupfer

Fern Lee Kupfer is an American author and retired professor of creative writing at Iowa State University. She has written several novels and as well as memoirs reflecting on her life experiences, the discovery that she is a carrier of the BRCA gene, and the loss of her son to Canavan disease.

Life and career

Kupfer was born in 1946 and grew up in Plainview, Long Island. In 1968 she received her BA from State University of New York at Cortland. She moved to Iowa with her first husband in the early 1970s after having been a high school English teacher and working at a day care center in Rochester, New York. She received her master's degree in English from Iowa State University in 1975, with a thesis on the concept of androgyny in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and later taught creative writing at the university for many years.

She has written several novels and two memoirs as well as contributing regular columns to the Ames Tribune and Newsday. Her first book, Before and After Zachariah, originally published by Delacorte Press in 1982, is a reflection on her family's decision to institutionalize her severely handicapped son.