Bernard Cooper was born in Hollywood, California, the youngest of four sons to second-generation Jewish parents. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in 1979. After graduating, he abandoned the visual arts in favor of writing, initially supporting himself as a shoe salesman. He has taught at the UCLA Writer's Program and at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

His writing is in part autobiographical and influenced by his own experiences as a gay man. Cooper's first book, Maps to Anywhere (1990), cannot easily be categorized. Published as a collection of memoirs and first-person essays, the book nevertheless won the 1991 PEN/Hemingway Award for Fiction. Cooper himself had always considered the pieces that make up the book as nonfiction; however, when he began to send his writings to various literary journals they began to publish them as short stories, fables, or even prose poems. Cooper's first novel, A Year of Rhymes (1993), is also largely autobiographical.

That novel was followed by a further collection of memoirs, Truth Serum (1996). The title piece, which originally appeared in the New Yorker, about his experiences with a psychiatrist who administered an experimental mixture of sodium pentothal and Ritalin intended to reduce the "frequency and intensity" of Cooper's sexual fantasies involving men and which instead empowered him to accept his homosexuality, won Cooper an O. Henry Award.

Cooper's most recent work, Guess Again (2000), is a collection of eleven short stories, most previously published in such literary periodicals as Ploughshares, the Paris Review, and the North American Review. These precisely crafted stories, equally humorous and poignant, are concerned with love, loss, betrayal, tolerance, and acceptance.

Cooper resides in Los Angeles, California and is currently the art critic for Los Angeles magazine.