PRESS RELEASE
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS AND COMMUNICATION
CONTACT: Dr. John Vanderslice, (501) 450-3653, johnv@uca.edu
September 15, 2014
AWARD-WINNING WRITER BERNARD COOPER
TO KICK OFF UCA’S LGBT HISTORY MONTH FESTIVITIES
By Heather Steadham
UCA Department of Writing
CONWAY — The month of October will be filled with events to help celebrate the diversity of gender identity/sexual orientation on the University of Central Arkansas campus, from display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Harrin Hall to the Pride Walk anchored in the Crafton Alumni Pavilion.
One highlight of this year’s festivities will be a visit from award-winning writer Bernard Cooper, who will be an artist in residence with the UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication.
Cooper, a memoirist and fiction writer who, with razor wit, unsparing honesty and cutting insight, explores themes of sexuality, familial relationships, AIDS and loss, will give a public reading at the College of Business Auditorium on Tuesday, Sept. 30, beginning at 7 p.m. A Q&A session and book signing will follow.
The reading is free and open to the public.
Dr. John Vanderslice, associate professor of writing, said he was excited to have such a notable literary figure kicking off this year’s LGBT History Month.
“Just about everything Cooper writes comes out of his own lived experience as a gay man, but at the same time Cooper touches on universal themes and essential human connections that make his work meaningful and accessible to readers, regardless of how they define their sexuality,” Vanderslice said. “His is a significant voice in contemporary letters, a writer who not only composes some of the most heartbreaking and quietly lyrical fiction you will ever read but who at the same time is an expert memoirist and perhaps the most significant memoirist writing in the United States today.”
Growing up gay in 1950s and ‘60s Los Angeles, Cooper is sensitive to questions of identity and exclusion of all sorts—including self-exclusion. He has written two critically acclaimed collections of essays—Maps to Anywhere (1990) and Truth Serum (1997)—as well as a book-length memoir about his father, The Bill from My Father (2007); the novel A Year of Rhymes (1993) and a collection of short stories, Guess Again (2000).
In 2015 he will publish My Advant-Garde Education: A Memoir, which details his years studying modern art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. His work has appeared in Story, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and other leading journals; it has also been selected for five volumes of The Best American Essays. Cooper has won numerous awards, among them the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Cooper’s work has been read on nationally syndicated radio shows such as This American Life and Selected Shorts. His reputation as an engaging speaker has won him loyal audiences across the country.
For more information about Cooper’s visit, contact Vanderslice at johnv@uca.edu or (501) 450-3653.
The Artist in Residence program is funded by UCA’s arts fee and is administered by the College of Fine Arts and Communication. For more information about the program, call the Office of the Dean, College of Fine Arts and Communication, at (501) 450-3293 or e-mail jdmiller@uca.edu.
The UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication includes the Departments of Art, Communication, Mass Communication and Theatre, Music and Writing. The college’s primary mission is the preparation of the next generation of artists, educators and communicators. For more information about CFAC, visit www.uca.edu/cfac or call (501) 450-3293.
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