Paula Kaufman is from Charleston, WV. As a child she sold jewelry and soap at over 20 craft shows. In middle school she began writing for The Charleston-Gazette newspaper which she still writes for today as a columnist. 

In high school, she studied International Baccalaureate (IB) art at the only school in WV offering the program, held solo exhibitions of her photography, drawings, paintings, and ceramics, and founded and directed her own arts camp for five years. She completed a full poetry manuscript before college.

She earned a B.A. with honors in Literary Arts and American Civilization from Brown University, where her studies focused on underrepresented voices in America, particularly Black women poets. Her honors thesis was a poetry collection, The History of Water, exploring water’s spiritual and environmental significance.

For her M.A. at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, Paula researched the influence of formerly enslaved women on Southern cuisine. She examined how African ingredients and techniques — including the kola nut used in Coca-Cola — shaped American foodways, with enslaved women passing on expertise in rice cultivation, cooking, preservation, and botanical knowledge.

Her interest in ancient Japanese poetry at Brown from a favorite professor, led her to Japan through the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Program. She lived in Esashi, Hokkaido two years where she honed her watercolor skills through the long winters. She held a solo exhibition. 

Some of her favorite subjects to paint were fishing nets drying on the beach, brightly colored clusters of buoys and the squid fishing boats. 

Her international teaching journey continued in Nablus, Palestine, teaching creative writing at An-Najah National University. 

After Palestine, Paula spent the next decade teaching in varied settings, including outdoor guiding in Maine and West Virginia, and continued her arts education at the John C. Campbell Folk School as an apprentice, taking classes ranging from ceramics and stained glass to blacksmithing. 

She also spent a few years in county government as Deputy Planning Director in Kanawha County, before realizing that wasn’t her calling. 

She then moved to DC teaching art and other subjects to middle school students. She lived four years at NLAPW (National League of American Pen Women)—the oldest organization for women writers, painters and musicians in the country. She was blessed to spend many of her evenings listening to music from some of America’s greatest stars from her bedroom or in the audience. While there, she participated in group exhibits, showing her watercolors and worked as the director’s assistant. 

In order to improve her stained-glass teaching skills at the middle school in DC, she took weekly stained-glass lessons from the city’s longest-practicing church window restoration artist.

Paula moved to Elkins in summer, 2024, to immerse herself in the mountains, painting, and writing. She currently teaches English and ESL at Davis & Elkins College and in Randolph County Schools and serves as an arts instructor with ArtsBank and the Randolph County Community Arts Center.