Dean Bakopoulos

When his debut novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt, 2005), catapulted to success- acclaimed as a "Book to Remember" by the New York Public Library, named one of the New York Times Book Review‘s "100 Books of the Year," and honored as a book or novel of the year by Friends of American Writers, the State of Michigan Library, and Council of Wisconsin Writers, among many other accolades- no one who was familiar with Dean Bakopoulos would have been surprised.  He had been writing professionally since the age of twenty, beginning as a journalist for CBS News in Detroit.  While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he recieved the Hopwood Award and a Cowden Fellowship in Creative Writing.  After graduating, the publication of his first short story in PRISM earned a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference.  A full fellowship to the Vermont Studion Center soon followed, where he began work on his debut novel.

Dean Bakopoulos has been deeply involved as well with the Wisconsin Humanities Council (WHC), serving as its inaugural director in 2001, later as a consultant while he completed his M.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and finally as executive director from 2004 to 2008.  Under his guidance, the WHC’s Wisconsin Book Festival has grown to be among the most popular in the country.

He has been an invited lecturer at the Institute for Labor Relations at Cornell University, Potsdam University in Germany, and the University of Michigan, among others.  He was also a visiting writer at Baruch College in New York City and artist-in-residence at Shake Rag Alley Arts Center in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, where two of his one-act plays, "Phonies" and Wayside," have been staged by the Alley Stage theatre company.

Harcourt published his second novel, American Unhappiness, in 2008.  During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, he will be working on third novel, tentatively titled Harmony.