Free Admission! / Start 5:30pm / Doors 5:15pm / Standing Show
Book launch for Wyn Cooper’s novel Way Out West.
I never knew what would happen next in Wyn Cooper’s novel Way Out West, but from the moment Robin, driving on a lonely road at night, hits a shadowy pedestrian, I desperately wanted to. Set in the stark and beautiful landscapes of Nevada and Arizona, the novel follows Robin and Tyler into the complicated worlds of moviemaking, love, drugs, and espionage. The remarkable poet Wyn Cooper has written a spellbinding novel. —Margot Livesey
Wyn Cooper’s first novel, Way Out West, was published by Concord Free Press in 2022.
He has also published five books of poetry, including, most recently, Mars Poetica. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, Five Points, Slate, and more than 100 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry.
In 1993, “Fun,” a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.” He has also cowritten songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, Jody Redhage, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released Forty Words for Fear, a CD of songs based on poems and lyrics by Cooper, set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Their second CD, Postcards Out of the Blue, based in part on Cooper’s postcard poems, was released in 2008. Their songs have been featured on six television shows.
Cooper has taught at Bennington College, Marlboro College, the University of Utah, and The Frost Place. He has given readings across the country, as well as in Europe and South America. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Vermont and works as a freelance editor.