Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper born 10 January 1953

Dennis Cooper is a poet, writer and performance artist, most noted for transforming the visual/verbal aesthetic of punk into its written counterpart.

Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Pasadena, California. His literary aspirations were explored early on and often took the form of imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, De Sade, and Baudelaire. He wrote poetry and stories in his early teens that explored scandalous and often extreme subjects. As a teenager, Cooper was an outsider and the leader of a group of poets, punks, stoners and writers. After high school he attended Pasadena City College and later Pitzer College where he encountered a poetry teacher who was to inspire him to pursue his writing outside of institutions of higher learning.

In 1976 Cooper came to England to become involved in the nascent punk scene In the same year he began Little Caesar Magazine which included among other things an issue on and dedicated to Rimbaud. In 1978 with the success of the magazine, Cooper was able to found Little Caesar Press.

In 1979, Cooper became the director of programming at an alternative poetry space, Beyond Baroque, in Venice, California. In 1984, Cooper moved to New York City. In 1987 he moved to Amsterdam where he finished writing Closer which took as inspiration a postcard that featured an image of Mickey Mouse carved onto the back of a young boy.

While in Amsterdam he also wrote articles for different American magazines including Art in America, The Advocate, the Village Voice and others. He returned to New York in 1987 and began writing articles and reviews for Artforum, eventually becoming a Contributing Editor of the magazine. He began working on his next novel, Frisk. In the next few years Cooper worked on several different art and performance projects including co-curating an exhibit at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) with Richard Hawkins entitled AGAINST NATURE: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men.

After moving to Los Angeles from New York in 1990, Cooper collaborated with a number of artists, including composer John Zorn, painter Lari Pittman, sculptors Jason Meadows and Nayland Blake, and others. He has edited a number of collections of new writing. He completed his renowned, ten years in the writing sequence of five interconnected novels, 'The George Miles Cycle,' in the year 2000 - Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. Since then he has written three novels: My Loose Thread, The Sluts (winner of the Lammy Award for best book of gay fiction of 2005), and God Jr.

Since the summer of 2005, Cooper has spent most of his time in Paris, France. While there, he has worked on his wildly popular blog, which Cooper considers his current major artistic project, and has collaborated with the French theatre director Gisele Vienne and composer Peter Rehberg on four works for the theatre, I Apologize (2004), Un Belle Enfant Blonde (2005), KIndertotenlieder (2007), and a stage adaption of his novella Jerk (2008). These theatre works have been highly acclaimed and have toured extensively in Europe and the UK. While in France, Cooper finished a new book of poetry, The Weaklings, which was published in a limited edition by Fanzine Press in March 2008, and a collection of short fiction titled Ugly Man which was published by Harper Perennial in 2009.

As of late 2009, Cooper was completing his ninth novel, tentatively titled The Marbled Swarm. 2010 will see the publication of three books by Cooper: a volume of his selected non-fiction pieces entitled Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback Obituaries, an expanded paperback edition of his 2008 poetry collection The Weaklings, and the reissue of his and the artist Keith Mayerson's 1997 graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged. In addition, This Is How You Will Disappear, Cooper's fifth theatre work created in collaboration with the French director Gisele Vienne and the musician and composer Stephen O'Malley will premiere at Festival de l'Avignon in July followed by a European and Asian tour beginning in autumn 2010.