Claire Kahane is a feminist literary critic and memoirist who lives in Berkeley, California. A Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo and a Research Associate at U.C. Berkeley, she has published essays on British and American fiction, the Gothic novel, and Holocaust literature. “On the road” for many years before becoming an academic, she turned her experiences into a picaresque memoir, Nine Lives: Adventures in Becoming. She now writes short pieces about her long life.