Brent Cunningham was born in Wisconsin and grew up on both coasts. He has an M.A. in English from SUNY-Buffalo. Since 1999 he has worked for Small Press Distribution. His poetry, fiction, plays, and reviews have appeared in Radical Society, Chain, Rain Taxi, Kenning and elsewhere. He is sometimes at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
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as reviewed in Publishers Weekly (August 2005):

"Ancient Roman rhetoric meets post-modern angst and continental philosophy in this ambitious, intentionally self-conscious and verbose debut.  A lineated "prelude" and closing "reprise" notwithstanding, Cunningham arranges the volume into four sequences composed largely in clever, disorienting, poetic prose.  The first, a series of 12 "orations," shuffles urbane contemporary contents into a pastiche of Ciceronian style: "Let's therefore speak directly and plainly, O my community," it opines.  "Would it kill me to simply say: I have never understood others, my father was in management, and it is 5:15 in the evening?"  The next sequence follows a representative "bird" through challenges and questions about the shape of history and the contradictions behind any idea of individual voice.  Cunningham here resembles his peers less than he resembles Helene Cixous and Maurice Blanchot, attempting at once to convey a vision and to deconstruct it: "If we prefer our bird to be the soul, the forest will leaden and concretize itself."  One lyrical essay personifies "The Future," while another emulates 19th-century prose, positing a "Demon Hierarchy of the French Philosophers."  Cunningham's searching intelligence may lead some readers to cherish this book directly and intensely; others may find it cerebral and byzantine, like an avian mind within a darkened wood."

Advance praise for Bird & Forest:

"Bird & Forest is clear, beautiful writing. There is a simple quality of the well-told-tale to these fractured fables. This is a patient, wise and hilarious work whose intimate tone insinuates itself into your psyche only to have its way with you and then suddenly vanish. What more could you want?"

—Laura Moriarty

"With orations, fables, axioms, proofs, journals, and letters, Brent Cunningham offers a riposte to the confounding realities of empire just when we need it most. The repeated "awakenings" of Bird & Forest suggest the wonder of conversion narrative without the ideological baggage. Engaging myriad rhetorical "types," he exhausts their function to disclose the backstory of creation, romantic love, and the curious permanence of warfare while gorgeously demonstrating the resilience of the imagination."

—Peter Gizzi