Britt Kaufmann

Britt Kaufman lives and writes in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. Her gardens are larger than she can manage, but she enjoys listening to sci-fi audiobooks as she weeds. During the school year, she works as an in-class high school math tutor. Midlife Calculus is her first full-length collection of poetry which loosely chronicles the year she took calculus for the first time, at age 47, so she could cross it off her bucket list. Her previous chapbook belonging was published by Finishing Line Press (2011). Over the years, her poems have appeared in Scientific American, Kakalak, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Redheaded Stepchild, Now & Then, Pinesong, and SoftStar Magazine among others. Both of her stage plays premiered at Parkway Playhouse: Between the Tackles (2011), about three men who watch football together. and An Uncivil Union: The Battle of Burnsville (2012), a romantic comedy set amidst actual historical events during the Civil War. She is a founding organizer of the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival and continued as a core board member for many years.

Book Description

Britt Kaufmann set out to take calculus for the first time at age 47 so she could cross it off her bucket list. She did not expect it to lead to her first full-length collection of poetry: Midlife Calculus. Calculus is the study of how things change, so it’s a fitting title for poems about midlife, about learning something difficult and new, and the state of public education post pandemic. These poems, often short, bear witness to the struggles of both teachers and students. And, like any woman’s romp through perimenopause, the mood and tone vary wildly, but always with a call to reflect and find moments of peace and purpose, to “work literal equations / and maybe wonders, / figure the balance between expectations / and grace.”

Praise for Midlife Calculus

Midlife Calculus is a delight! Kaufmann plays with and infuses mathematical ideas into her poems in ways that are by turns clever, thought-provoking, sobering, and humorous. She rotates a familiar scene on its axis just slightly so that the everyday becomes profound.

—Deirdre Longacher Smeltzer, PhD in Mathematics and co-author of Methods for Euclidean Geometry

If you were to graph Britt Kaufmann's Midlife Calculus, you'd get a sine curve going convex and concave from comfort to danger and back again, approaching infinity. A thought-provoking poetry collection. Britt could teach My Dear Aunt Sally the order of operations for writing lyrically about math.

—Jessy Randall, author of Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science

Poetry’s work of aiding our survival has never been more essential than it is now. Britt Kaufmann’s Midlife Calculus performs this function in startling and refreshing ways, using the language of mathematics to investigate subjects such as the pandemic, the U.S.’s failing educational system, and school shootings while refusing despair, showing readers that the search for a sense of peace is not in vain.

—Daniel Shank Cruz, author of Queering Mennonite Literature and Ethics for Apocalyptic Times