Bernard Cooper

Bernard Cooper is going to surprise you. Nothing will have prepared you for his hybrid of memoir and fiction or his open-hearted, humorous readings and lectures. Cooper's prose is resonant and exquisitely crafted. Growing up gay and middle class in the Los Angeles of the 1950s and 60s, sexuality, familial relationships, loss, and AIDS -- these are among Cooper's primary subjects. Through them all, he expresses his deepest concern: how the writer explores identity by traveling the terrain of memory. Masterfully recalling details with delicacy and uncontrived finesse, Cooper reveals a wisdom as he looks back, which ultimately transforms the way we examine our own lives.

Bernard Cooper has published two collections of memoirs, Maps to Anywhere and Truth Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes. His work has appeared in Story, Ploughshares, Harper's, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Best American Essays and The Oxford Book of Literature on Aging. His recent publications include a collection of short stories, uess Again. He is the author of The Bill From My Father: A Memoir (paperback, 2007), which is being made into a Warner Brothers film by director Dean Parisot.

Bernard Cooper has won numerous awards and prizes, among them the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities Fellowship. He has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles and at the UCLA Writer's Program and is currently the Art Critic for Los Angeles Magazine. The recipient of a 2000 Guggenheim fellowship and a 2004 grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, Bernard Cooper has been the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine. His new book is entitled The Bill From My Father: A Memoir.