Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham
Born: November 6, 1952
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Occupation: novelist
Nationality: American
Debut works: Golden States (1984)
Influences: Virginia Woolf

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in La Canada Flintridge, California, in Los Angeles County. He studied English literature at Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later at the University of Iowa he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review.

In 1993 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and at Brooklyn College.

Although Cunningham is gay and has been partnered for 18 years, he dislikes being referred to as only a "gay writer", according to a PlanetOut article [1] because while being gay does greatly influence his work, he feels that it is not (and should not be) his defining characteristic.

Currently, he teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Brooklyn College.
Cunningham has adapted a screenplay from the Susan Minot novel Evening. He is also a producer for the film which, according to IMDb, stars Glenn Close, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep.

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