Michael Copperman

About Me

I teach writing to at-risk students of color at the University of Oregon, where I received my MFA in fiction. I also have a B.A. in English with Creative Writing from Stanford, where I graduated summa cum laude and was a Presidential Scholar. My nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, The Oxford-American, Gulf Coast, Creative Nonfiction, Guernica, GOOD, Copper Nickel, The Literary Review, New Madrid, The Rumpus, Stanford Magazine, PostRoad, Luna Park, Teachers and Writers, Anderbo, Brevity, Eclectica, Intermat, The Oregonian, The Willamette Writer, The Register-Guard, and The Eugene Weekly. I was the recipient of the 2009-10 Walter Morey Fellowship from Literary Arts, and I recently won a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission and was concurrently nominated for The 2012 Pushcart Prize. My fiction has been published in The Arkansas Review, Unsaid, Copper Nickel, and 34th Parallel, and is forthcoming from Camera Obscura. My story “Harm,” was shortlisted for the 2009 Sean O’Faolain International Fiction Prize and appears in issue 17 of the Munster Literature Centre’s magazine Southword.

From 2002-04, I taught fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. I am currently seeking representation for a novel that concerns that experience.

Why do you write?

Writing is how I understand.

Any favorite authors? Books?

I love Andre Dubus, Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Bernard Malamud, Chekhov, Fitzgerald in Gatsby and not in his short stories, Zora Neale Hurston, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore and early Ann Beattie, Carver, James Baldwin, Edward P. Jones in "Lost in the City," and a lot else that's probably more telling but reflects badly on my taste.