This episode features award-winning flash fiction, essay, children's literature author Desiree Cooper, originally live-streamed on November 6, 2022 to kick off Children’s Book Week. During the episode we chatted about her first children’s picture book, Nothing Special, which was released in October.
Published by Wayne State University Press and illustrated by Bec Stone, Nothing Special is a buddy story that spans generations. But it's also a love letter to the black family connections that survived the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South, but they never forgot the culture, the land, and the family they left behind. In the decades since, it’s been a summer ritual for many black families to reverse the journey and return South for a nostalgic visit to their homeplaces. Nothing Special celebrates the enduring connection between the generations who stayed in the South, and the millions of emigrants for whom it will always be home.
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. 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. Her first children’s book, Nothing Special, received a starred review from Booklist. After spending her 30-year career in Detroit, she now lives in the Virginia Beach area where she cares for her mother and three grandchildren.
Please be sure to check out the live-streamed episode to see the beautiful illustrations that we discussed during our conversation.
Learn more about Desiree Cooper and her work by visiting: http://www.descooper.com/.
Find Desiree on Instagram: @descooper
Find Nothing Special on Instagram: @nothing_special_book
