About The Author

Robert Coe is a writer living in New Jersey. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Arts and Leisure section, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Esquire, New York, The Village Voice, American Theatre Magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His first play, War Babies – the first world premiere drama produced by the Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse in California – received four nominations from the San Diego Theater Critics Circle, including Best New Play, and a Drama-Logue Award for Best Play. Coe’s original book for The Photographer (music by Philip Glass) opened the first NEXT WAVE Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and subsequently toured the eastern United States. Coe also served as the dramaturg and occasional co-writer for Laurie Anderson’s United States: Parts I-IV, a two-evening-long work that premiered at BAM and went on to introduce performance art into the international arts mainstream.

In the commercial theater, Coe wrote a new book for the national tour of the Tim Rice/ABBA musical Chess, directed by two-time Tony winner Des McAnuff, who was also Coe’s co-writer on Perfect Light, a screenplay for Touchstone Pictures and The Walt Disney Company. Coe, who performed as a dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Jane Comfort, and others, later wrote the official companion book to PBS’s long-running television series, Dance in America (E.P. Dutton). JOCK: a memoir of the counterculture, about his years as a distance runner at Stanford University, was published in 2015.

The author of catalogues for the first NEXT WAVE Festival at BAM and the first New York International Festival of the Arts – the largest performing arts festival of the twentieth century – Coe has recently published two more books: Survivors of a Future That Never Happened (Montreal Publishing, 2022), a collection of his scholarship and journalism, and a first novel, The Princess of the Leafy Suburbs (2024). Most recently, he had a 2025/2026 Fellowship from the New York City Public Library at Lincoln Center to present a public lecture about choreographer Jones.

Coe holds a B.A. from Stanford with Honors and Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa in the Humanities Special Program (Focus: The Modern Novel). He also holds a master’s degree in English from SUNY Buffalo, where he passed his Oral Examination for a doctorate.