David Morris Kipen

David Kipen (born August 14, 1963) is an author, critic, broadcaster, arts administrator, full-time UCLA writing faculty member and nonprofit bilingual lending librarian. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, OZY.com and elsewhere. The former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in his native Southern California.

Print and multimedia journalism Kipen was born in Los Angeles and educated at public schools and Yale. After starting out editing sections for the Los Angeles city magazine Buzz and Variety, Kipen served from 1998 to 2005 as book critic and editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. While there he wrote the magazine essay on screenwriters that became his first book, The Schreiber theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Melville House). His op-ed "An open letter to Uniontown from Los Angeles" ran as part of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Pulitzer-winning coverage of the 2018 synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation. Another op-ed, "85 Years Ago, FDR Saved American Writers. Could It Ever Happen Again?" ran in the Los Angeles Times in May 2020 and has helped create a groundswell of support for the revival of the Federal Writers' Project.

DEAR LOS ANGELES The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018 by David Kipen Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs Time Turns Around at Musso & Frank The Américas: Chapter the First