Dean Kuipers

Kuipers was born in the Seattle area, where his father was serving in the United States Air Force.[8] He lived in Marysville, Washington and Everett, Washington before his family relocated to West Michigan.[9] He earned a degree in English from Kalamazoo College in 1987.

In 1987 Kuipers moved to New York City to work at Ear Magazine, an avant-garde music publication. He became a staff writer at Spin in 1989. He also reported on local politics, and he and a girlfriend were beaten by police while he was covering the Tompkins Square Park riot in 1988.[10]

In 1994, Kuipers moved to Los Angeles to work for Ray Gun, where he helped launch several other lifestyle titles. He worked with artist Doug Aitken on his 1997 film, Diamond Sea, and other films. He became the founding news editor of alternative newsweekly LA CityBeat in 2004.[11] His non-fiction book Burning Rainbow Farm tells the story of Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, Michigan marijuana activists who were killed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Michigan State Police officers a standoff in 2001.[12][13] He joined the Los Angeles Times in 2007 as a digital edition editor, then worked as a music editor and ran Greenspace, a blog operated by the city of Seattle.[14][15] He remained with the company until 2012.

His work has also appeared in Playboy, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, Orion, Interview, Travel & Leisure, Outside, LA Weekly, and other publications.[16][17][18]

• Kuipers, Dean; Aitken, Doug (2000). I Am a Bullet : Scenes from an Accelerating Culture. Crown; 1st edition. ISBN 978-0609604090.
• Kuipers, Dean (2006). Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1596911420.
• Kuipers, Dean (2009). Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado's War to Save American Wilderness. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1596914582.

• 2018 Best of the West award in business and financial reporting[19]
• 2007 Michigan Notable Book[20]