Cunningham, Michael

Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, grew up in Pasadena, California, and studied at Stanford and the University of Iowa. As a young man Cunningham wanted to be a painter, he worked in bars and travelled around. He then moved to New York where he worked as a dancer in a gay bar and began to submit his stories to various magazines. He started to write a novel after he had a story published in the New Yorker. He now lives in New York with his partner, the psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, and teaches creative writing at Yale University at New Haven. Michael Cunningham has received several literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Hours (1998) in 1999.