Go Play Outside

Robert Cooperman grew up on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn and still remembers playing basketball in almost every schoolyard and playground in the borough. Passionately, if not very well. Later he supplemented that first love with a love of poetry, and studied the art at the University of Denver's Ph.D. program in Literature and Creative Writing. Cooperman has taught composition and literature at the University of Georgia; Bowling Green State University, in Ohio; and the University of Baltimore. He's also led various poetry writing workshops on an ad hoc basis. Cooperman has had more than twenty volumes of poetry published, among them In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Books), which won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. The Widow's Burden (Western Reflections Books) was the runner-up for the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West. Draft Board Blues (FutureCycle Press) was named One of The Ten Best Books by a Colorado Author for 2017 by Westword Magazine. My Shtetl won the Holland Award from Logan House Press. Cooperman's most recent collection is The Ghosts and Bones of Troy (Aldrich Press), which posits, what if Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and his wanderings with what we'd now call PTSD? Also forthcoming from Aldrich Press is Reefer Madness, partly field trip through Cooperman's misspent youth and partly inspired by the fact that the Girl Scouts of Colorado had okayed the sale of their cookies outside of the state's pot dispensaries. Some things you just can't make up. In addition, Cooperman's two most recent chapbooks, Saved by the Dead (Liquid Light Press) and All Our Fare-Thee-Wells (Finishing Line Press), are love letters of sorts to his other obsession, the Grateful Dead. Cooperman lives in Denver with his wife Beth.