Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who writes extensively about racial and gender equality. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, won numerous awards, including 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and River Teeth, among other publications. Her essay “We Have Lost Too Many Wigs” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2019, and her essay “What If I Hadn’t Been There to Catch Them?” ran in the New York Times‘ Modern Love column in 2023. She is the author of the children’s book Nothing Special, and editor of the forthcoming anthology Black Summers: Detroiters Take on the Great Outdoors, both published by Wayne State University Press. After spending her thirty-year career in Detroit, she now lives in the Virginia Beach area, where she cares for her mother and three grandchildren.
Agent
Larissa Melo Pienkowski
