Wyn Cooper
Nantucket Poetry Festival: 2026 PoetsWyn Cooper has published six books of poetry, including, most recently, The Unraveling (2026). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, as well as in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Many of his poems have been turned into songs, including by recording artists Sheryl Crow, David Broza, and Madison Smartt Bell. His first novel, Way Out West, was published in 2022. He lives in Vermont and works as a freelance editor.
Related Events: 2026 Program
Find Wyn Cooper at the events listed below. View the full 2026 itinerary here.
Opening Night: Poetry from the Archives | Thursday, August 27th | Quaker Meeting House, 4 - 6 pm
Publishers Roundtable | Friday, August 28th | Cafe 22, 3rd floor, 11 am - noon
Visiting Poet Reading: Wyn Cooper and Andrea Cohen | Friday, August 28th | 41 Main Street — Lemon Press 2nd floor, 5 - 6 pm
Poetry Market! at the Nantucket Farmers & Artisans Market | Saturday, August 29th | Cambridge St. — Farmers & Artisans Market, 9 am - 1 pm
Workshop: Poetry of Place with Wyn Cooper | Saturday, August 29th | 8 Howard St. — Greater Light, 3 - 5 pm | Registration required.
Closing Night: Reading & Open Mic at the Atheneum | Sunday August 30th | 1 India Street — Nantucket Atheneum — Great Hall 2nd floor, 7:30 pm reading & 8:30 pm open mic
Books Featured at the Festival
The Unraveling
“These are poems of engagement and attachment, of wisdom and bafflement. With arresting restraint, Cooper interrogates intimacy and distance—how hard it is to know the self, and others. These poems are a masterful and haunting catalogue of how we navigate—churning forward and looking back—with the memory of perfumes, with "false compasses," with the "velour clutch filled with grievances" we might never let go of.”
— Andrea Cohen
White Pine Press, 2026
Way Out West
“I never knew what would happen next in Wyn Cooper's novel Way Out West, but from the moment Robin, driving on a lonely road at night, hits a shadowy pedestrian, I desperately wanted to. Set in the stark and beautiful landscapes of Nevada and Arizona, the novel follows Robin and Tyler into the complicated worlds of moviemaking, love, drugs, and spying. The remarkable poet Wyn Cooper has written a spellbinding novel.”
— Margot Livesey
Concord Free Press, 2022
Mars Poetica
“From the opening words of Mars Poetica, Wyn Cooper creates for us nothing less than a manual for memory. The word "reverie" punctuates these poems, and no wonder! For in this book, Cooper wanders and dreams whole continents, the pattern of a skirt, a song no longer playing, lost friends, former homes, spent years. What will we miss the most when we have left Earth? Everything Cooper gives us here and more.”
— Kathy Fagan
White Pine Press, 2018
Postcards from the Interior
“In the intimate, coded, and revealing form of the postcard Wyn Cooper charts new realms of aesthetic, spiritual, and geographic space. He blurs the distinction between the public and the private, discovering in history, the weather, favored places, and states of consciousness a wealth of imaginative possibilities. Wish you were here, these poems seem to say in a variety of enduring ways. And you are.”
— Christopher Merrill
Boa Editions, 2005