Dave Barry Wife: Who Is Michelle Kaufman and Their Family Story Today
If you’re looking up “Dave Barry’s wife,” you want the real name behind the bio line, not a swirl of outdated snippets. Dave Barry’s wife is Michelle Kaufman, a respected sportswriter. They married in 1996, built a mostly private family life, and have a daughter together—while both continued careers built on words, deadlines, and public attention.
Quick facts
- Dave Barry’s wife: Michelle Kaufman
- Married: 1996
- Known for: Sportswriter and columnist
- Children: Dave has two children (a son from a previous marriage, and a daughter with Michelle)
Who is Dave Barry’s wife?
Dave Barry’s wife is Michelle Kaufman. If your search results keep bouncing between “wife,” “spouse,” and old relationship timelines, here’s the clean takeaway: Michelle Kaufman is the partner Dave Barry married in 1996, and she’s also a public figure in her own right—just in a different lane than Dave’s humor writing.
Dave is famous for turning everyday nonsense into art and making you laugh at situations you didn’t even realize were ridiculous. Michelle is known for sports journalism—reporting, columns, analysis, and the kind of work that requires precision and a strong grip on facts. It’s an interesting pairing on paper: one career thrives on finding the absurd in life, the other thrives on describing real events clearly, quickly, and accurately.
Who is Michelle Kaufman?
Michelle Kaufman is an American sportswriter and columnist, widely recognized for her long-running work covering sports. She’s especially known for soccer coverage, but sportswriting at that level is rarely “one sport forever.” It’s travel, tight turnarounds, late games, early flights, and writing cleanly even when you’re tired.
In other words, she’s not “Dave Barry’s wife who happens to have a job.” She’s a serious journalist who built her own career and reputation. That’s one reason people are curious about her: when two writers marry, it’s hard not to wonder what their household sounds like. Do they swap drafts? Do they argue over commas? Do they agree that deadlines are a lifestyle?
Even if you never get the behind-the-scenes details, you can see the shape of it: they both understand writing as work, not just as talent. That shared understanding can matter a lot in a relationship, because it reduces the “Why are you still working?” friction that can show up in households where only one partner lives by the deadline clock.
When did Dave Barry and Michelle Kaufman get married?
Dave Barry and Michelle Kaufman married in 1996. That year is the anchor point you’ll see repeated across biographies and profiles, and it’s the most useful piece of information for anyone trying to verify “wife” versus “ex-wife” versus “current spouse.” If you want to say it in one sentence that stays accurate and simple: Dave Barry’s wife is Michelle Kaufman, and they’ve been married since 1996.
That also means their relationship has lasted through multiple phases of modern media: the print-heavy years, the internet era, and the social-media era where everything becomes searchable forever. For a couple that includes two journalists, that shift is especially intense. You’re not just living through a cultural change—you’re living inside an industry that’s reinventing itself constantly.
Do Dave Barry and Michelle Kaufman have children?
Yes. Dave Barry and Michelle Kaufman have a daughter together, Sophie. Dave also has a son, Robert, from a previous marriage. People sometimes miss that detail because they assume “kids” means “kids with current spouse,” but Dave’s family story spans more than one chapter.
This matters for two reasons. First, it keeps you accurate when you’re reading fast celebrity bios that collapse everything into one sentence. Second, it helps explain why the “Dave Barry wife” keyword sometimes gets tangled with older relationship references. Dave has been married more than once, and the internet loves to keep every version of a biography alive at the same time.
Why the internet sometimes makes this question confusing
When someone is famous for decades, even simple personal facts can get messy online. Here’s why “Dave Barry wife” can look more complicated than it is:
Outdated bios stick around. Old pages written years ago often rank well in search results, even if they weren’t updated later.
People mix up “wife” and “ex-wife.” If someone had a previous marriage, some sites grab the wrong name and label it as current.
Fiction blurs into real life. Dave Barry’s work inspired a sitcom, and fictionalized versions of a family can create lingering confusion for casual readers who skim.
The simplest way to stay grounded is to focus on the timeline: Dave Barry married Michelle Kaufman in 1996, and she is the wife most people mean when they ask this question today.
Dave Barry’s earlier marriages, in plain English
Since you searched “wife,” not “wives,” you may not care about the earlier relationships. But a quick, calm explanation helps you understand why multiple names might appear in different places.
Dave Barry had marriages before Michelle Kaufman. One earlier marriage is commonly listed to Ann Shelnutt. Another was to Beth Lenox, with whom he shares his son, Robert. Those marriages ended years before he married Michelle.
If you’re writing about this in a bio or answering someone quickly, you don’t need to dive into private details. You can simply say: Dave Barry is married to Michelle Kaufman; he was married previously and has an older son from that earlier marriage.
What makes their relationship interesting beyond the headline
A lot of celebrity relationship content tries to sell you drama. But the more interesting angle here is the quiet compatibility of two people who both work with language, public attention, and professional pressure.
Think about it: humor writing is not “just being funny.” It’s structure, timing, restraint, and the willingness to rewrite until the joke lands cleanly. Sportswriting isn’t “just loving sports.” It’s accuracy, speed, clarity, and the discipline to describe what happened without making it about you.
Those skills look different, but they share a backbone: professional writing is a craft, and it can be exhausting. When both partners understand that, you don’t have to justify why you need quiet, why you’re working late, or why you’re staring at a sentence like it personally offended you.
It’s also a pairing that makes sense in a very Miami way. Dave spent years as a columnist associated with the Miami Herald. Michelle’s career is also rooted in journalism. Their worlds overlap naturally, but they aren’t competing for the same lane. That separation can be healthy: shared values, different beats.
How privacy plays into the “wife” question
Another reason people keep searching is that Dave Barry and Michelle Kaufman don’t live like a reality show. They aren’t constantly “performing” their relationship online. For some public couples, that’s surprising—people assume fame means access. But not everyone wants their marriage turned into content.
And honestly, that boundary is probably part of why the relationship feels stable from the outside. When the public only gets the basics, it’s harder for rumor cycles to feed on daily updates. You don’t get a new headline every week, so the relationship doesn’t become a weekly storyline.
The trade-off is that the internet fills the silence with guesses. That’s how you end up with mismatched names, old spouses mislabeled as current, and random “bio” pages claiming certainty without actually being careful.
What to say if someone asks you directly
If you want a clean answer you can repeat without stumbling into outdated info, use this:
Dave Barry’s wife is Michelle Kaufman. They married in 1996 and have a daughter together.
If you want to add one extra line for context:
He also has a son from a previous marriage.
That’s it. No rumors, no messy wording, no accidental mix-ups.
The takeaway
“Dave Barry wife” points to one name: Michelle Kaufman. She’s a sportswriter with a career of her own, and she and Dave Barry have been married since 1996. They share a daughter, and Dave has an older son from a previous marriage. If your search results look contradictory, it’s usually because the internet recycles old bios—not because the answer is complicated.
