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 the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash Fiction America 2023, The Best Small Fictions 2018, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, and Best African American Fiction 2010, and she had a piece chosen as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper’s children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and included on the New York Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.” Her groundbreaking anthology, Black Summers: Race, Childhood, and the Urban Outdoors, is forthcoming in 2026.
Workshop
The Good, The Bad, and the Fascinating: Creating Realistic Characters
Do you ever worry that the main characters in your work might be (check all that apply):___Boring ___Stereotypical ___Unbelievable ___Unlikeable (not in a good way)? Do you wonder if a character might suffer from these qualities even when the character in the story is YOU? Prose writers (yes, that includes memoirists!), let’s work on creating compelling, dynamic, vulnerable, tragic, hilarious, and unforgettable people on the page.
