Fern Kupfer
American writer
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. The experience made her an advocate for parents who choose institutionalized care for children with severe disabilities. The book has had 5 editions published between 1982 and 1998 and has also been published in French as Avant et après Zacharie.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5444461. VIAF identifies the subject as 79354790. The Library of Congress control number is n81126552. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1968, 1975 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fern Kupfer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.