Matthew Cooperman

Cooperman’s criticism and interviews have also appeared widely in such journals as Angelaki: A Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Salt, ecopoetics, Chicago Review, jubilat, The Writers’ Chronicle, The Iowa Review, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Humanities, American Studies International and the American Book Review.

Matthew Cooperman is an American poet, critic and editor. He is the author of five full-length collections of poems, most recently Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), Imago for the Fallen World (w/Marius Lehene, Jaded Ibis, 2013) and Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press). Cooperman’s first book, A Sacrificial Zinc, won the Lena Miles Wever-Todd Prize from Pleiades in 2001.

Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath Press, 2011)

Cooperman has also been active as a collaborator, working with such varied groups and persons as Sharon Butcher Dance, Marisol Eckert Collective, artist Lisa Cooperman, Italian artist Simonetta Moro, Canadian composer Libby Larsen, and British poet Lawrence Upton. In 2004 he co-founded the collective Accidental Vestments with the Romanian artist Marius Lehene. Since that time he and Lehene have been active on a number of projects, most notably the image and textbook Imago for the Fallen World. With the poet Aby Kaupang, Cooperman has authored a number of works, most notably the ongoing projects NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) and Jungle Book: A Memoir of Abilities. The two often perform together.

Cooperman was born in 1964 in New Haven, CT, but grew up in the Bay Area of California. He attended Colgate University, the University of Colorado and Ohio University, where he earned a PhD in English Literature and Language. Cooperman has taught at the University of Colorado, Ohio University, Harvard University, Denver University and Cornell College. He is currently Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins, with the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.

His poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including 1913, American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, CHAIN, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, ecopoetics, Hotel Amerika, Interim, International Quarterly, New American Writing, Parthenon West, Pleiades, Quarterly West, Sentence, Verse and VOLT, among others, and in anthologies including Ecopoetry, The Sentence Book of Prose Poetry, and The Next of Us is Yet to Be Born (Kent State).