Paul Cook was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1950 and has lived all of his life in Arizona with the exception of three years in Salt Lake City from 1978-1981 where he studied English at the University of Utah where he received a Ph.D. in 1981. He currently resides in Tempe, Arizona and has been teaching at Arizona State University since 1982. He has taught a wide range of courses from creative writing courses to literature courses, both British and American. He also teaches ASU's first science fiction class, Eng 369: Science Fiction Studies. He also designed, built, and installed the Virginia C. Piper Creative Writing Center's Time Capsule, which is not to be opened until 2103. He has taught authors as diverse as Thomas Pynchon, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Carlos Castaneda, Ezra Pound, and John O'Hara.

Novels

• Tintagel (Ace Science Fiction: 1981)
• The Alejandra Variations (Ace Science Fiction: 1984)
• Duende Meadow (Bantam Spectra: 1985)
• Halo (Bantam Spectra: 1986)
• On The Rim Of The Mandala (Bantam Spectra: 1987)
• Fortress On The Sun (RocSF: 1997. Reprint Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor Books, 2008)
• The Engines Of Dawn (RocSF: 1999. Reprint Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor Books, 2008)
• The Karma Kommandos (Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor Books, 2008)

Other writing

Paul Cook has also published short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction, and Amazing Science Fiction.

He has also published over 150 poems in a wide variety of literary non mainstream magazines such as The Georgia Review and Quarterly West. He also writes (and continues to write) classical music criticism, having written for ClassicsToday.com and MusicWeb-International.com. He now writes classical music reviews exclusively for The American Record Guide. He has written extensively on the music of Shostakovich, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Prokofieff.

He most recently wrote the introduction to Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs from Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press, 2006) and is the Series Editor for the Phoenix Science Fiction Classic series from Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor books. He is also an immense Doc Savage fan and a fan, in general, of pulp fiction from the 1930s and 1940s.