Wyn Cooper

Background

Cooper was raised in Michigan and later attended the University of Utah and Hollins College.

He has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place Festival of Poetry. His most recent book is Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010. His earlier books are Postcards from the Interior (BOA Editions, 2005), The Way Back (White Pine Press, 2000), and The Country of Here Below (Ahsahta Press, 1987).

Cooper's poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Orion, AGNI, Crazyhorse, and Ploughshares and are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry. One of his poems, Fun, was used for the lyrics of the Sheryl Crow song, 'All I Wanna Do'. Crow's producer Bill Bottrell discovered Cooper's poetry book The Country of Here Below in Cliff's Books, a Pasadena, California used bookstore. Bottrell adapted Fun into the lyrics for her song when Crow couldn't come up with usable lyrics—earning Cooper considerable royalties, and helping to publicise his book, originally published in a run of only 500 copies in 1987, into multiple reprints. He also wrote lyrics for a fictional band in Madison Smartt Bell's novel, Anything Goes. The songs were put to music by Bell, recorded and produced by Don Dixon and released as 40 Words for Fear in 2003. The second Bell and Cooper cd, Postcards Out of the Blue, was based in part on Cooper's book Postcards from the Interior. Their songs have been used on 6 television shows. Cooper has also written and recorded songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, and Jody Redhage.

Cooper has served as editor of Quarterly West and recently worked for the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation of Chicago. Cooper is one of the organizers of the Brattleboro Literary Festival in Brattleboro, Vermont. He currently resides in Halifax, Vermont, where he works as a freelance editor of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and memoir. His website is www.wyncooper.com.

Works