Michael Copperman
Michael Copperman has a B.A. in English from Stanford University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was a Presidential Scholar. He teaches writing to low-income, at-risk students of color at the University of Oregon, where he received his MFA in Fiction. His nonfiction has appeared in The Oxford American, GOOD, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Teachers and Writers, Stanford Magazine, Post Road, Anderbo, Eclectica, Brevity, The Oregonian, The Register-Guard, and The Eugene Weekly, and is forthcoming from New Madrid, GOOD and Copper Nickel. He was the recipient of the 2009 Walter Morey Fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts. His fiction has been published in the Munster Literature Centre’s journal Southword (after being shortlisted for the 2009 Sean O’Faolain Prize), The Arkansas Review, and 34th Parallel, and is forthcoming from Copper Nickel and Unsaid. From 2002-04 he taught fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, and he is currently seeking representation for his novel “Gone,” concerning that experience.
“...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.”