Will Kaufman is the author of American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Choice 360 Award for the best academic title in music. He was born in New York City and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, earning a BA in English and History from Montclair State College in 1981 and, as a Marshall Scholar, a PhD in American Literature from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1985. After thirty-three years’ teaching English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire (now University of Lancashire) in Preston, England, he retired as Emeritus Professor of American Cultural History. Kaufman is recognized internationally as the world’s leading authority on Woody Guthrie, having written three books on the American balladeer: Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011), Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues (2017), and Mapping Woody Guthrie (2019). His other works include Singing for Peace: Antiwar Songs in American History (co-authored with Ronald D. Cohen, 2015), American Culture in the 1970s (2009), and The Civil War in American Culture (2006).