Biography of multimedia artist and author Rob Couteau.

Literary work:
Couteau is the author of the novel Doctor Pluss, the literary anthology Collected Couteau, and the poetry collection The Sleeping Mermaid. Early in his career he won the North American Essay Award, a competition sponsored by the American Humanist Association. After living in Paris for twelve years (1988-2000), he now resides in the Mid-Hudson Valley, where he writes and paints. In 2016 he published a collection of essays and literary interviews with other authors (including Justin Kaplin, Michael Korda, and Robert Roper) titled More Collected Couteau (Revised, Second edition: 2020).

His work as a literary critic, interviewer, and social commentator has been featured in books such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 'Love in the Time of Cholera': A Reader’s Guide, by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury, ed. Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen’s Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless mentally ill.

Critical Reception:
In his Introduction to More Collected Couteau, author James Demsey writes: "Having spent many years as a journalist, I believe I have some ability to recognize and admire an artful interviewer, and Couteau is a master. His preparation is comprehensive, meticulous, and profound. His understanding of the process of writing in so many genres allows him insights into the particular problems faced by the writers he interviews…. You'll also find herein Couteau's writings on literature, which I hesitate to call criticism since they lack the worst features of much literary criticism, which can be clogged with so much pretentiousness, cant, and philosophical obfuscation that it would take a plunger of Brobdingnagian proportions to restore a healthy flow. Couteau's essays are often rhapsodic appreciations and evocations of the work under study, and are stuffed with both insights and joy."

In a review of The Sleeping Mermaid for the Midwest Book Review, Willis M. Buhle says: “Novelist and literary enthusiast Rob Couteau brings readers part of his love with The Sleeping Mermaid, a book of flowing poetry and thought that asks plenty of questions and offers plenty of answers. The Sleeping Mermaid is a poetry collection well worth considering.” And in an Introduction to the book, the biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno writes of how the author’s “poetic excursions take us to many places: to the Paris of Rimbaud and Picasso, to the Native North Americans, to mythology and history and how the woman he is encountering is seducing him as he seduces her (and us), and finally, how alone, the cosmos plays itself out at 3 a.m. when the only lap dog is memory.”

Author Jim Feast, in his Evergreen Review essay on Doctor Pluss and Collected Couteau, remarks upon the author's “Intellectual freshness, richness, and potency,” adding: “An impressively creative writer, whom Barney Rosset urged me to review.” Rosset, the former owner of Grove Press and the first American publisher of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet, led the legal battle to publish D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

Collected Works:
* poems from the late twentieth century. (This chapbook is now part of the Special Collections of New York University, Yale University Library, Colby College, Michigan State University Libraries, Northwestern University, and UCLA Library.)
* Doctor Pluss.
* Collected Couteau: Poems, Letters, Essays, Interviews.
* The Sleeping Mermaid. With an Introduction by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno.
* Portraits from the Revolution. Interviews with the Protestors from Occupy Wall Street, 30 Spetmeber - 8 October 2011.
* More Collected Couteau: Essays and Interviews. With an Introduction by James Dempsey.
* Wonder (forthcoming). With a Preface by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno and an Introduction by Robert Roper.

All these books are now part of NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections archive, available in the "Downtown Writer's" section.

Writing Published in Periodicals:
Couteau’s work has appeared in over one-hundred periodicals, including The Alembic; Anima; Arete; Bloomsbury Review; Blueline; Cadillac Cicatrix; Chrysalis; Colere; Confluent Educational Journal; Croton Review; Footwork; The Garden State; Emerging Civil War; Evergreen Review; Hawaii Pacific Review; Heavenbone; Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy; Kennedys and King; Lapis; Lift Magazine; Mochila Review; New Leaves Review; Occupy the Press; Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology; Open Road Integrated Media; Out of Our; Passager; Psychological Poems: Journal of Outsider Poetry; Quantum; Rain Taxi; Rockhurst Review; Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture; Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; The European; The Humanist; The Paris Voice; Venice Magazine; Versitude; West Hills Review; White Pelican Review; Xanadu; and Z Miscellaneous.

Interviews with Other Authors:
* Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: “The Biographer of Paul Bowles and Other Expatriates Talks about Writing the Outsider’s Story: An Interview with Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno,” Bloomsbury Review, March 1991, and later featured in Collected Couteau.
* Ray Bradbury: “The Romance of Places: An Interview with Ray Bradbury,” Paris Voice, November 1990; Quantum: Science Fiction & Fantasy Review, spring 1991; and Nelson Thornes Framework English Resource Book 2, ed. Geoff Reilly and Wendy Wren (Cheltenham, (U.K.: Nelson Thornes Ltd., 2003). The complete interview was featured in Conversations with Ray Bradbury (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004) and in Collected Couteau.
* Hubert Selby: “Defining the Sacred: Hubert Selby on Spirituality, the Creative Will, and Love,” Rain Taxi Review of Books, December 1999. The complete interview later appeared in Collected Couteau.
* Albert Hofmann: “Albert Hofmann: An Appreciation. A Brief Interview with the Discoverer of LSD,” Rain Taxi Review of Books, June 2008.
* Michael Korda: “The Charmed Life: A Conversation with Michael Korda,” Rain Taxi Review of Books, summer 2010.
* Jeffrey H. Jackson: “Remembering the Deluge: An Interview with Jeffrey H. Jackson,” Rain Taxi Review of Books, December 2010.
* Robert Roper: “An Interview with Robert Roper, Author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War,” Emerging Civil War, October 2011.
* William Scott: “An Interview with William Scott, Author of Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker,” tygersofwrath.com, October 2011.
* Justin Kaplan: “The Mystery of the Man: Justin Kaplan Talks about America’s Greatest Poet,” tygersofwrath.com, December 2011.
* Robert J. De Sena: “The Miracle of Unity. Peace Mediator Robert J. De Sena Discusses How He Offers Gang Members a Way Out,” tygersofwrath.com, September 2014.
* Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: “When Feeling is First.' A Conversation with Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno About E. E. Cummings's Prose Masterpiece, The Enormous Room,” tygersofwrath.com, February 2015.
* Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno: “Paying Attention. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno Discusses His New Book of Poems, The Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany,” tygersofwrath.com, February 2015.
* James Dempsey: “An Interview with Biographer James Dempsey, Author of The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer,” tygersofwrath.com, July 2015.
* Robert Roper: “A Conversation with Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita,” tygersofwrath.com, August 2015.
* Edward Halsey Foster: "‘If you are a poet, you help other poets.’ A Conversation with the Poet, Publisher, and Literary Historian Edward Halsey Foster."
* Sylvette David: "An Interview with Picasso's Famous Model and Muse, Sylvette David: 'The Woman with the Key.'" tygersofwrath.com, January 2018. Abridged version at talismanmag.net, January 2018.
* Danny Goldberg: "Remembering the Magic Year." An Interview with the former president of Atlantic Records and author of "In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea," Rain Taxi Review, spring 2018.
* Philip Willan: "The Tragic ‘Years of Lead’: The Manipulation of Terrorism, the Global War on the Left, and the Links between the JFK and Aldo Moro Assassinations." Kennedys and King, September 2019.

External Links:
* Literary Publications by Author Rob Couteau. The Official Web Site.
* Review of Second, Revised edition of Doctor Pluss, Midwest Book Review, by Diane Donovan, March 2020.
* Review of More Collected Couteau: Essays and Interviews, Publisher's Weekly, Select, February 2016.
* Review of Portraits from the Revolution, Midwest Book Review, by Diane Donovan, November 2015.
* Interview with Rob Couteau on the death of Ray Bradbury, Monocle 24 Radio June 2012.
* Review of The Sleeping Mermaid, Midwest Book Review, by Willis M. Buhle, August 2010.
* “Defining the Sacred: Hubert Selby on Spirituality, the Creative Will, and Love.” Couteau’s interview with Hubert Selby.
* “Off the Palette: Rob Couteau.” Interview with Rob Couteau, Hudson Valley Business, 1 March 2010.
* “Portrait Robert Couteau. Un americain a Paris,” by Alice Gaillard, Netsurf. Le magazine Internet, May 1998. Interview of Rob Couteau, in French, conducted in Paris.