Desiree Cooper – författare

While a mother can be defined as a creator, a nurturer, a protector—at the center of each mother is an individual who is attempting to manage her own fears, desires, and responsibilities in different and sometimes unexpected ways. In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women—both black and white—find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives.In this heart-wrenching collection, Cooper reveals that gender and race are often unanticipated interlopers in family life. An anxious mother reflects on her prenatal fantasies of suicide while waiting for her daughter to come home late one night. A lawyer miscarries during a conference call and must proceed as though nothing has happened. On a rare night out with her husband, a new mother tries convincing herself that everything is still the same. A politician’s wife’s thoughts turn to slavery as she contemplates her own escape: “Even Harriet Tubman had realized that freedom wasn’t worth the price of abandoning her family, so she’d come back home. She’d risked it all for love.” With her lyrical and carefully crafted prose, Cooper’s stories provide truths without sermon and invite empathy without sentimentality.Know the Mother explores the intersection of race and gender in vignettes that pull you in and then are gone in an instant. Readers of short fiction will appreciate this deeply felt collection.

Six-year-old Jax can't wait to leave Detroit and spend a week with his grandparents in coastal Virginia, where he's sure he'll be spoiled with the kinds of special things he enjoys at home: toys, movies, and hamburgers. As he dreams of the adventures he'll have, his PopPop has other ideas. He fills their days with timeless summer fun—crabbing, shucking corn, and counting fireflies. Illustrated entirely of repurposed textiles, 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. 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 has become a summer ritual for many black families to reverse the journey and return South for a visit to their homeplaces.

A triumphant, cross-generational exploration of Black joy and resilience.Remember frolicking outside during the long, jubilant days of summer? This vibrant collection invites readers to breathe deeply and return to that "carefree" season. From riding bikes with friends through the neighborhood, to hopping the ferry to Boblo Island, catching catfish along the river, dancing on warm nights to Afrobeats and jazz music, and cooling off in the Swimmobile, those sun-drenched memories were often clouded by racism for the Detroiters in this evocative anthology. These emerging and award-winning creators of all ages recount the struggles and triumph of staking their claim to public spaces. Ranging from poetry to essay, creative nonfiction to comics, this collection blends nostalgia with struggle and resilience. Arising from the iconic city of the African American experience comes this exploration of Black joy in the urban outdoors.

A vivid portrait of trying to find home when two places are calling.Alex Vartan Gubbins paints a stunning portrait of a life lived between his two homelands: Michigan and Armenia. Written primarily in English with some poems in Armenian, this collection combines elegy and lyric across prose and open forms to shed light on the conundrum of diaspora—feeling rooted here, there, and in neither place entirely. Crossing the boundaries of space and time, Gubbins probes and unsettles notions of legacy, family, diaspora, geopolitical borders, and narratives of power. The ebb and flow of sadness and longing, paralleled by unshakeable spirit, ultimately settles within these poems as hope and wonder at existing in the everyday.

A collection honoring the experience of human connection.Inspired by classic Motown and the Midwest's rich history of social poetics, Andrew Collard's poetry collection asks readers to trust their bodies and the experience of human connection in a society that alienates us from our handiwork and from each other. Set largely in Southeast Michigan, these poems evoke the joys and difficulties of raising a family amid financial uncertainty in the empire of the automobile. Poems like "Bus Stop Promenade" and "Loneliness in the Key of Sprawl," in tone and form, embrace the challenge of putting language to experience, while the "Autotopia" sequence addresses issues of labor and the environment. Lo-Fi Citadels is a love song sung among grocery stores, bus stops, malls, and vacant lots to remind us what we're made of. This stunning book emphasizes the interrelatedness of living things and revels in the interdependence of the human body and mind.