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Bernard Cooper

Bio: 
Bernard Cooper is the author of Maps To Anywhere; A Year of Rhymes; Truth Serum; a collection of short stories, Guess Again, and his most recent book is The Bill From My Father. Cooper's many awards include the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in literature. His work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Essays and as well, in magazines and literary reviews including, Harper's, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Cooper teaches Creative Non-Fiction at Bennington College.

Joyce Farmer is best known for co-creating the Tits 'n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix. Her graphic memoir Special Exits is a Fall 2010 release from Fantagraphics Books.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist. A longtime staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, she covers books, music, visual art and social issues and identity politics. Her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where she teaches journalism.

Marisela Norte is the recipient of the Ben Reitman award from San Diego State University for Peeping Tom Tom Girl, a collection of poetry and prose. Her poems featured on MTA buses in the OUT YOUR WINDOW project were recently selected among the the ten best transit poems in the world by the Atlantic. Norte continues to document life in Los Angeles in words and through photography via public transportation.

Michael Tolkin is the author of four novels: The Player, Among the Dead, Under Radar, and The Return of the Player. He won the Writers Guild of America award for his screenplay for The Player, and also directed the movies The Rapture and The New Age.

David L. Ulin is book critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2005-2010, he was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

Bernard Cooper

In Conversation With Charlotte Innes
Sunday, June 1, 1997
01:29:53
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary

Bernard Cooper writes eloquently about the difficult landscape of memory as it pertains to sexuality, loss, AIDS, and family. He is the author of the collection of memoirs Maps to Anywhere, the novel A Year of Rhymes, and a recent collection of memoirs, Truth Serum. He received the 1991 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award and a 1995 O. Henry Prize. He has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles, for the Masters of Professional Writing program at USC, at the UCLA Writer’s Program, and he has been a core faculty member in the MFA Writing Program at Bennington College. Of Truth Serum, playwright Tony Kushner has written, "One of the most beautiful and moving memoirs I've ever read... Reading Bernard Cooper is like reading Chechov, and he's really that good."

This program was originally produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Participant(s) Bio

Charlotte Innes, a freelance writer, regularly reviews books for the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Nation.

Writing and the Art of Not Knowing

George Saunders and Bernard Cooper: Reading and Conversation.
Moderated by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
01:20:12
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

"We work in the dark," said Henry James. "Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task." Two completely original, and often hilarious writers, Saunders (Tenth of December) and Cooper (The Bill from My Father) begrudgingly agree. Saunders and Cooper step out of the dark and onto the stage to discuss how they grapple with the difficult, but essential challenges of their creative work.

Participant(s) Bio

Bernard Cooper is an author of The Bill From My Father, and the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in literature.  His work has appeared in several anthologies, magazines, and literary reviews, including five volumes of The Best American Essays, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He has contributed to National Public Radio's "This American Life", and Los Angeles Magazine. Mr. Cooper currently teaches in writing programs at Bennington College and USC.

George Saunders, a MacArthur Genius Grant fellow, is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, including Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as a collection of essays and a book for children. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. His most recent work is a collection of short stories, Tenth of December.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of the "20 Under 40" fiction writers by the New Yorker. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.

From the Outside Looking In: Writers Finding Their Place in Los Angeles

Moderated by David L. Ulin
Thursday, March 15, 2012
01:30:45
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary
Literary Los Angeles has always existed apart from our country's publishing capital--3,000 miles apart, to be exact. What does this distance offer writers and book artists? What are the freedoms and the challenges of being outside the traditions and trends of literature? A panel of L.A. writers-authors of fiction, essays, graphic novels, screenplays, and poetry-delve into these questions, considering their impact on both the individual and the community.

Part of Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles Art 1945-1980
Participant(s) Bio
Bernard Cooper is the author of Maps To Anywhere; A Year of Rhymes; Truth Serum; a collection of short stories, Guess Again, and his most recent book is The Bill From My Father. Cooper's many awards include the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in literature. His work has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Essays and as well, in magazines and literary reviews including, Harper's, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Cooper teaches Creative Non-Fiction at Bennington College.

Joyce Farmer is best known for co-creating the Tits 'n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix. Her graphic memoir Special Exits is a Fall 2010 release from Fantagraphics Books.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist. A longtime staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, she covers books, music, visual art and social issues and identity politics. Her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where she teaches journalism.

Marisela Norte is the recipient of the Ben Reitman award from San Diego State University for Peeping Tom Tom Girl, a collection of poetry and prose. Her poems featured on MTA buses in the OUT YOUR WINDOW project were recently selected among the the ten best transit poems in the world by the Atlantic. Norte continues to document life in Los Angeles in words and through photography via public transportation.

Michael Tolkin is the author of four novels: The Player, Among the Dead, Under Radar, and The Return of the Player. He won the Writers Guild of America award for his screenplay for The Player, and also directed the movies The Rapture and The New Age.

David L. Ulin is book critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2005-2010, he was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection

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