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Chris O. Cook was born and raised on Long Island, New York, where he attended Cold Spring Harbor Junior/Senior High School, graduating in 1996. He got up to the county tournament in the junior-high spelling bee, but was eliminated on the word "mimicry," which is fitting, because he is so original.
He
earned his BA
from Ohio's Kenyon College, where he studied writing under James
Kimbrell, Erin Belieu, P.F. Kluge, and Jennifer Clarvoe, and was the
recipient his junior year of the John Crowe Ransom Prize in Poetry.
He
graduated in 2000 with High Honors in English, which would have been
Highest Honors except that certain people on the committee thought his
comps were teh sexist (their exact words). How many times did
Chris have to explain, he was
playing a character? Jeez.
Chris subsequently earned an MFA in Poetry from the
University of Iowa
Writers' Workshop, where he studied under Marvin Bell, Dean Young,
James Galvin, Robert Hass, Mark Levine, and Donald Revell. He
was
the
recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, and once hit for the cycle
in Workshop softball vs. the Fiction writers. Nothing you
have
heard about him regarding this period in his life is true, especially
if you heard it from Whatsherface. No-one knows what her
problem
with Chris was. It has been suggested that she just totally
wanted to get with Chris and just, you know, couldn't deal with it.
He
lived for years in Chicago, where he taught
comp/rhetoric and lit at DePaul
University and Harper College, but has recently relocated to New York
City, where he keeps putting off trying out for Jeopardy!,
because
if he gets on and loses he will have to kill himself. Or at
least
not go outside for a while. But he doesn't go outside for a
while
so much already that it's like, you know, what's the difference.
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