Born in Chicago in 1958, David Breskin first made his name in the 1980s and early ’90s as a freelance journalist, writing for national magazines such as GQ, LIFE, and, most prominently, Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor. Breskin covered a wide range of cultural figures—Willie Nelson and Bono, Miles Davis and Martin Short, Michaels Jordan and Jackson—and authored high-profile investigative pieces on teen suicide, murder, and mayhem.
After publishing a novel, The Real Life Diary of a Boomtown Girl, Breskin turned away from journalism and toward poetry, and by the mid-1990s had begun publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, New American Writing, and TriQuarterly, among other periodicals. His first book of poetry, Fresh Kills, was published in 1997, and his second, Escape Velocity, in 2004. Between those volumes, he created and edited RICHTER 858, a multimedia inquiry into the abstract paintings of Gerhard Richter, with music by Bill Frisell and contributions by thirteen American poets. His next work, Supermodel (2007), was a one-sentence epic poem, or novel-in-verse. More recently, Breskin conceived and produced DIRTY BABY, which married his sixty-six ghazals to sixty-six pictures by Ed Ruscha and music by Nels Cline. He has also published a book of interviews with film directors, Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation, which features dialogues with Francis Coppola, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, Tim Burton, and Clint Eastwood.
Breskin has also worked as a record producer for the past thirty-five years and, in addition to Frisell and Cline, has collaborated with leading-edge musicians beginning with John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Vernon Reid, and Joey Baron in the ’80s and early ’90s, and continuing with Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, and Chris Lightcap in the current decade.
Breskin lives in San Francisco. Most of his work may be found at davidbreskin.com.