Weizmann, Daniel 1967-

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WEIZMANN, Daniel 1967-

PERSONAL: Born 1967.

ADDRESSES: Home—Los Angeles, CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Thunder's Mouth Press, 161 William St., 16th floor, New York, NY 10038

CAREER: Journalist and poet.

WRITINGS:

Take a Stand!: Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Government, Price Stern Sloan (Los Angeles, CA), 1996.

Miss Piggy in Wonderland, Price Stern Sloan (Los Angeles, CA), 1998.

The Adventures of SuperGonzo!, Price Stern Sloan (Los Angeles, CA), 1998.

(With Lisa Rojany) Diary of a Rotten Stinking Liar, Price Stern Sloan (Los Angeles, CA), 1998.

(With Sid Fleischman and Lisa Rojany) McBroom'sGhost, Price Stern Sloan (Los Angeles, CA), 1998.

(Editor) Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of thePoet Laureate of Skid Row, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor to several books, including Too Cool and Hardcore California.

SIDELIGHTS: Daniel Weizmann is a Los Angeles journalist and poet. His first book was a secondary-level social studies primer titled Take a Stand!: Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Government. It takes students on a lighthearted but sincere exploration of various world governments, with an emphasis on the workings and branches of U.S. democracy. Peg Glisson of the School Library Journal predicted that students would respond to the "breezy introduction to American government," noting, "There's lots of humor in the text . . . [to] lighten the serious content." In the late 1990s Weizmann authored two Muppet books for young readers: Miss Piggy in Wonderland and The Adventures of Super-Gonzo! With Lisa Rojany and Sid Fleischman, he wrote another young-reader book, McBroom's Ghost, and collaborated again with Lisa Rojany on Diary of a Rotten Stinking Liar.

Charles Bukowski, the patron saint of hard-bitten, hard-drinking Los Angeles poets, died in 1994, and six years later Weizmann gathered a varied collection of remembrances, tributes, and even denouncements of Bukowski from the writer's friends, admirers, peers, and ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. The result was Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row, featuring works by Sean Penn, Karen Finley, Raymond Carver, and thirty-two others. Booklists's Ray Olson characterized the book as "a ragbag of excerpts from books about the man, short memoirs, interviews, [and] poems that honor Buk's own manner while brilliantly aping it." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt the pieces—themselves, "by turns amusing, tiresome, charming, repellant and moving"—"give a remarkably coherent, even, at times, redundant portrait of this abusive, alcoholic, egocentric, gifted and sometimes misunderstood literary bad boy." William Gargan of Library Journal agreed that the collection is "a mixed bag in every way" that "paints a fair and accurate portrait of Bukowski."