Welcome to my website. I am a poet, literary translator, and book critic.

I am the author of two poetry collections, Glued To The Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire (PulpBits, 2003). PulpBits went out of business in March 2007, but by clicking on their titles you can download free PDF files of these ebooks.

Glued To The Sky includes both narrative and lyric poems concerning group identity and gender issues in a wide variety of forms . Listen to an audio version of Glued To The Sky.

JFK: Lines of Fire is a sequence of dramatic documentary vignettes culled from the literature concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.

My translation of Israeli poet Rachel Eshed's book Little Promises is published in a bilingual edition by Mayapple Press. In its Hebrew original, this collection of intense erotic poetry won the 1992 AKUM prize in Israel. My translation of one of the poems in Little Promises was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Novelist Tsipi Keller says, "It is hard to speak of Rachel Eshed's poetry without mentioning 'fire' : her poems virtually burn on the page, and David Cooper's renditions not only do justice to the original but magnify its richness."

From 2010-2019 I reviewed books (mostly fiction and some poetry) for New York Journal of Books and am a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, though I am currently taking a break from book reviewing. In an effort to improve my Hebrew I am (visually) reading books exclusively in Hebrew, though I continue to listen to audiobooks in English (as well as Hebrew).

I earned an MA in Creative Writing at The City College of CUNY where I won the Academy of American Poets Prize. My poems are anthologized in XY Files: Poems On The Male Experience (Sherman Asher Publishing, 1997), and my poems and translations have appeared in numerous periodicals. I was a finalist in the 1999 Snake Nation Press book contest, and have been a semi-finalist in several other national contests, including the 2007 Pushcart Prize. I am also a graduate of Hunter College and Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where I specialized in media and communications. In addition to my book reviews on New York Journal of Books, my prose has also appeared in the now defunct examiner dot com, New York Woman, Poetic Voices, Mind Body and Soul, The Israel Economist, and the wire services of the Associated Press. I have taught history, poetry, and writing on the middle school, high school, and college levels.

Between 2007-2009 I compiled an archive of oral histories of Jewish-American marriages. These oral histories have been taken by my co-author Beth Rosenberg and me, and I hope someday a selection of them will be published in a form yet to be determined as  I Am My Beloved's, a collection of interviews and photographs of Jewish-American couples that explores the intersection of each couple's identities as a couple and as Jews and reflects the diversity of the Jewish-American community. 

You can find me on LinkedIn,  Twitter, and my Facebook page; If we know each other and you have a Facebook account please also visit my Facebook profile. There are additional links on my about.me page and on the next page (or click on "links" at the bottom of this page).

I live in Brooklyn, NY, with my wife abstract painter Shoshana Cooper.  

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