Michael Copperman

About Me

My prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Triquarterly, and Copper Nickel, among many others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission.

From 2002-04, I taught fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. My memoir, "TEACHER" (UPM 2016), a Finalist for the Oregon Book Award, concerns that experience.

Why do you write?

Writing is how I understand.

Any favorite authors? Books?

I love James Baldwin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cesar Vallejo, Andre Dubus, Gloria Naylor, Isaac Babel, Twain, 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, Edward P. Jones in "Lost in the City," and a lot else that's probably more telling but reflects badly on my taste.