Daniel Allen Cox


Daniel Allen Cox is a Canadian author and screenwriter. Cox's novels Shuck and Krakow Melt were both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award and the ReLit Award.

Life and career

Cox was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he was raised a Jehovah's Witness. His novella Tattoo This Madness In, about a young Jehovah’s Witness who uses Smurf tattoos to rebel against his faith, was nominated for an Expozine Alternative Press Award.
Shuck, his debut novel about a New York City hustler, was a Lambda Literary Award and a ReLit Award finalist. In the 1990s, Cox worked in pornography and modeled nude for New York City art photographers Stanley Stellar and Reed Massengill, as well as for Richard Kern, pioneer of the Cinema of Transgression movement.
Cox’s second novel Krakow Melt, about Polish pyromaniacs who fight homophobia, was excerpted in the US-based magazine The Advocate, nominated for the Ferro-Grumley Award, and named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List. The novel formed the basis of three essays in the debut issue of The Word Hoard, academic journal of the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University.
Cox co-wrote the screenplay for the Bruce LaBruce film Gerontophilia which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.
The author’s third and fourth novels, Basement of Wolves and Mouthquake, were also published by Arsenal Pulp Press. An excerpt of Mouthquake was translated for Nova Istra literary journal, the first queer text to be published in the Chakavian dialect of Croatian, as well as the first text to introduce the personage of Antonio Barichievich, Croatian-Canadian strongman, to a Croatian literary audience. Cox read the entire novel verbatim at a durational performance, the last event held at RATS9 gallery in Montreal.
Cox has appeared at Ottawa International Writers Festival, Blue Metropolis Montréal International Literary Festival, Winnipeg International Writers Festival, GritLit Festival, Westfest, Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, the San Francisco Sex Worker Film, Art & Music Festival, and Naked Heart Festival. At a Writers with Drinks event in San Francisco, Cox read with Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial. He has spoken at numerous universities, and was interviewed on CBC Radio One and on Airelibre TV.
Cox’s work has been published or is forthcoming in several literary journals, including Fourth Genre, Maisonneuve, Open Book Toronto, and filling Station. He is a former columnist for Xtra! and former president of the Quebec Writers' Federation, where he also served as a fiction writing mentor.