Dan Schneider

Dan Schneider (born 1965) is an American poet and critic of literature and film who runs the criticism and literary website Cosmoetica. He has written dozens of novels and short story collections along with thousands of essays and poems.

Biography Schneider was born in 1965 to a family from Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin. He is of Norwegian ancestry. His parents placed him for adoption, and he grew up with a working-class family in the Glendale-Ridgewood neighborhoods of Queens, New York. He claimed to have witnessed a murder at age six. He attended Franklin K. Lane High School, where he was part of a gang. After graduating from high school, he began writing poetry to court women while he was working as a dairy manager in a Finast grocery store. In 1987, he paid to print 2,000 copies of his first poetry book, Od Infinitum.

Writings

Schneider has reportedly written "30 novels, 15 short story collections, 300 short stories, 1,300 essays, and thousands of poems," HackWriters,

Cosmoetica website Schneider runs the website Cosmoetica, which the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature included in a list of several significant Illinois-based literary magazines outside of academia. New York Times poetry columnist David Orr featured the site in the 2004 article "Where to Find Digital Lit" alongside 16 other online-only literary sites, including Bookslut, FanFiction.net, and Foetry.com.

Schneider also publishes interviews on his site with authors, poets, scientists and others such as James Berardinelli, James Emanuel, and Chris Impey. In the introduction to a special edition of Fire!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, Ronald Bailey noted Schneider's interview with Emanuel as an "important source" on the poet. An Emanuel quote from the interview also appeared in the poet's New York Times obituary.

Critical response Several writers have commented on Schneider's critical writings on Cosmoetica. In the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cyril Wong wrote: "I think it is high time every lover of contemporary poetry reads Dan Schneider's essays," which he described as "literary entertainment of the most vindictive and oddly cathartic kind." Writing in The New York Times, David Orr said of Schneider and Cosmoetica: "If you were looking for someone willing to call T. S. Eliot '1 of the most grossly overrated writers in the history of the world, & the English language,' Schneider is your man. His site includes similarly jolly commentary on a large number of contemporary writers."

Schneider's poetry has been praised by Waswo X. Waswo.