Pre-order Seeking Kenny: A Wrestler’s Journey by Michael Copperman.
📸: Kalalau Valley, Kauai
📸 © 2023 Mashal Copperman
about the author
Michael Copperman is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF.
ADVANCED PRAISE for SEEKING KENNY
“It’s been years since I’ve read a book of narrative nonfiction as honest, compassionate, and wise as Seeking Kenny. A journalistic investigation, a touching biography, a meditation on sport, persistence, faith, the natural world, and the search for meaning—this is a book I’m going to hand to my son. This is a book, I’m going to tell him, that will help you become a man, a better man.”
—Joe Wilkins, author, The Entire Sky
“What, in this generation, does it mean for a person to seek? To strive, to find . . . or simply not to yield? Seeking Kenny asks and begs the question in a narrative that merges biography and autobiography, memoir and testimony, and is presented in precise, poetic prose. The answer is gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, heart-rending . . . and incredibly moving.”
—David Bradley, author, The Chaneysville Incident
“Through the life of his friend and fellow wrestler Kenny Cox, Michael Copperman takes an honest, visceral, and moving look at sports and masculinity in his stunning book Seeking Kenny. This is a beautiful story about the importance of friendship and bonding as well as the ways men often define themselves by their physical abilities. In vivid and moving prose, Copperman tells of one man’s search for a place like Eden. In the process, he guides the reader to meditate on their own life and longings.”
—W. Ralph Eubanks, author, A Place Like Mississippi
“I don’t know whether it’s the intensity of the subject Michael Copperman has chosen (more likely, a subject that has chosen him) or the manner in which Copperman so vividly immerses the reader into the worlds of high school wrestling and Kenny Cox’s compelling and uncommon life, but Seeking Kenny urges you forward, moment by moment, page after page. And while Kenny left this Earth too soon, this book is one to celebrate, for its magisterial language, the many people brought so indelibly to life, and the engrossing but never easy answers to the questions it poses about American families, manhood, sport, identity, and their intersections. Truly one of a kind!”
—Tom Williams, author, Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales
essays
Reckonings: The Body Comes to Terms with Quitting
First publishing in Gay Magazine.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve lied to hundreds of people about what happened to my college wrestling career. Maybe more than that, to be honest, as the full story is not really known by anyone, even the coaches or my teammates at Stanford, because I never had the courage to face it.
Beneath the Mask of Toughness
First publishing in On Being.
Difference is not hard to understand if you are a person of color: It is a string of vulnerabilities to small violences. It starts early and persists, tells you where you belong in the world. Growing up in the vast whiteness of Oregon in the ’80s and ’90s, I could not escape my own face.
Reading the Water
First publishing in The Sun Magazine.
He fixes me with a fierce gaze, and I know he’s reviewing in his head the American Medical Association guidelines for alcohol consumption, his years of experience counseling patients as a family doctor, all the pain and death he’s seen among so many working-class men with hard, round bellies who cannot do without their nightly case of Coors, trying to figure out how to impart adequate warning to his lean, scornful son, who insists he can drink with moderation, when he himself has never taken a drink.
memoir
summary
When Michael Copperman left Stanford for the Mississippi Delta in 2002, he imagined he would lift underprivileged children from the narrow horizons of rural poverty. Well-meaning but naïve, this Asian American from the West Coast soon lost his bearings. He had no idea how to manage a classroom or help children navigate their considerable challenges. In trying to help students, he often found he couldn’t afford to give what they required, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences. His efforts to save child after child were misguided but sincere, and he offered children the best invitations to success he could manage. Still, he felt like an outsider who was failing the children and himself.