Kitty Hoffman
Montreal, Quebec, Canada | Writer | Resident in 2026
Kitty Hoffman’s essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers including The New Quarterly, Prism, Grain, The Malahat Review, Boulevard, The Common, and The Vancouver Sun. They have been published in anthologies including Fault Lines, Still Dancing, Listening with the Ear of the Heart, and Celebrating Canadian Women.
She holds an MFA from Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts (Nonfiction Writing, Graduate School of the Arts Fellow) and degrees from McGill University and the University of Toronto, where she taught English and American Literature before embarking on a career as an executive in the Canadian federal government and a consultant to international development agencies, mostly in India. She has taught literary nonfiction at Concordia University, Cuenca International Writers’ Conference, the University of Victoria, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference at Centrum, and the Victoria School of Writing.
Kitty is currently seeking representation for a book about the resonances between searching for her ancestor, the medieval father of kabbalah, and growing up among Holocaust survivors. She was born in Europe to refugee parents and came to Canada with them as a stateless child. The first person in her family to attend university and ultimately earn a doctorate, she was also often the first and only woman in her various professional roles. Thus was fostered a deep interest in the weight of history and tradition, the quest for belonging, the yearning for continuity in the face of traumatic discontinuity, and a passion to uncover creative strategies for moving forward.
In addition to a professional life of public and social service, coinciding with pioneering roles as a second wave feminist, Kitty was from childhood drawn to the more subtle and hidden aspects of life. Literature, music, and dance animated her heart and what she came to understand as her soul, and also offered experiences that used to be called mystical. Finally in midlife – right on schedule – she began to explore this aspect of existence more directly, through extensive study of kabbalah and training as a Spiritual Director.
Now it is the interplay of the inner and private with the social and public, the dance of history and tradition with liberation and transformation, that animate her thinking and her creativity. Her writing and her current project explore these tensions and convey the gradual emergence of a woman’s distinctive expression of living them.
She is the single parent of two children. Having lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Victoria, and Manhattan, she currently resides in Montreal.
Find more at kittyhoffman.com
