About the author:
\nDesiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow\, Pulitzer Prize-n ominated journalist\, former attorney\, and editor of the groundbreaking 2 026 anthology\, Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors. Her fiction\, poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times\, Oprah Daily\, MSNBC Daily\, Flash Fiction Ameri ca 2023\, Michigan Quarterly Review\, The Rumpus\, River Teeth\, Best African American Fiction 2010\, and n oted in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper&rsquo\;s children&r squo\;s picture book\, Nothing Special\, is a 2023 Paterson Prize winner and included on the New York Public Library&rsquo\;s &ldquo\;10 Bes t Children&rsquo\;s Books of 2022.&rdquo\; She is a founding board member of Cave Canem\, a residency for Black poets\; a former board member of the Furious Flower Poetry Center\; a current member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective\; and a fellow of Kimbilio\, a residency for \; Bla ck fiction writers.
\nBlack Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors is a provocative\, tender\, literary collection of essa ys\, poetry\, and graphic stories about how racism shapes life in the urba n outdoors. African American writers ages 16 to 74 share their memories of summertime in Detroit. In these pages\, water is both a spiritual divide between enslavement and freedom\, and a segregated space for whites only. Public spaces hold both enticement and threat\; summer road trips are as n ecessary as they are guarded. While the stories are uniquely Detroit\, the y are also emblematic of the barriers to the outdoors imposed upon Black a nd brown urban dwellers nationwide since The Great Migration. Persistent t hemes color their stories: How racism circumscribes Black outdoor particip ation. How divestment\, abandonment\, and racial politics continue to redl ine childhood summers. How childhood racial trauma still haunts the adults who survived it. Black Summers is a collection about struggle\, persisten ce\, and reinvention. But ultimately\, it&rsquo\;s a tribute to Black joy during the most carefree of seasons: summertime.
\nBooks will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac&rsquo\;s Backs &ndash\; Bo oks on Coventry.
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