Stephen Cooper is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for his fiction. His Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and he cowrote and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski. Veteran professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, his stories, essays, and articles about literature and film have appeared widely. He was born and still lives in Los Angeles.