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.

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. Her most recent memoir, Leaving Long Island and other departures, published in 2012, includes her experiences of divorce, the discovery that she carries the BRCA gene, and raising a blended family.

Kupfer's first marriage to Joseph Kupfer, a philosophy scholar whom she married in Williamsville, New York in the late 1960s, ended in divorce. They had two children, a daughter, Gabi and their late son, Zachariah. She is now married to Joseph Geha, a Lebanese-American academic and author of the novel, Lebanese Blonde. The couple live in Ames, Iowa.