The Steven Barclay Agency
12 Western Avenue
Petaluma, CA 94952
Phone: 707-773-0654
Fax: 707-778-1868
Website: www.barclayagency.com
Exclusive representation for speaking engagements
Bernard Cooper ~ Award-winning Memoirist, Novelist, and Short Story Writer
With his razor-sharp wit and unsparing honesty, Bernard Cooper peels back layers of the familiar, exposing the surprising truths that shape our lives. Cooper’s prose is resonant and exquisitely crafted. Often described as a “writer’s writer,” his disarming memoirs and fiction and his open-hearted, humorous readings and lectures have won him a loyal audience. Growing up gay and middle class in the Los Angeles of the 1950s and 60s, sexuality, familial relationships, loss, and AIDS — these are among Bernard Cooper’s primary subjects. Through them all, he expresses his deepest concern: how the writer explores identity by traveling the terrain of memory. Recalling details with delicacy and inventiveness, Cooper’s sensibility ultimately transforms the way we examine our own lives.
Bernard Cooper has written two collections of memoirs, Maps to Anywhere and Truth Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again. 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, and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles. 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 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been read on This American Life and Selected Shorts from Symphonyspace. Bernard Cooper has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles and at the UCLA Writer’s Program and is currently the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine.
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