J california cooper biography summary example

(Joan California Cooper)

PERSONAL: Born in Berkeley, CA; female child of Joseph C. and Maxine Rosemary Cooper; children: Paris Exceptional. Williams. Ethnicity: Black Education: Phony technical high school and several colleges. Religion: Christian. Hobbies take precedence other interests: Reading, nature, expeditions, painting, music, tap dancing.

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Black Playwright of honourableness Year, 1978, for Strangers; Pedantic Lion Award and James Solon Award, both from the Earth Library Association, 1988; American Precise Award, 1989, for Homemade Love; named Woman of the Crop by the University of Massachusetts; named Best Female Writer entice Texas.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Family: A Novel, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1991.

In Search star as Satisfaction, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1994.

The Wake of the Wind, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

Some People, Some Other Place, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2004.

SHORT History COLLECTIONS

A Piece of Mine (includes "$100 and Nothing!," "Loved fit in Death," "Sins Leave Scars," "The Free and the Caged," significant "Color Me Real"), foreword moisten Alice Walker, Wild Trees Keep under control (Navarro, CA), 1984.

Homemade Love (includes "The Magic Strength of Need," "Without Love," "Happiness Does Pule Come in Colors," "Spooks," "Living," and "The Watcher"), St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1986.

Some Contend to Keep (includes "Sisters remind you of the Rain," "Feeling for Life," "About Love and Money," "The Life You Live (May Sob Be Your Own)," and "Red-Winged Blackbirds"), St. Martin's (New Royalty, NY), 1987.

The Matter Is Life, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1991.

Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1995.

The Forward-looking has a Past, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2000.

Wild Stars Hunt Midnight Suns: Stories, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2006.

OTHER

Author of xvii plays, including Strangers, first get in 1978, and Loners; besides author of short story "Such Good Friends," 1990; contributor outline Center Stage: An Anthology a few Twenty-One Contemporary Black-American Plays, draw by Eileen Joyce Ostrow, Lincoln of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1991.

SIDELIGHTS:J. California Cooper writes bill a vernacular style that begets extensive use of African-American parlance. Usually set in small country communities, her works focus perimeter the lives of poor be middle-class black women who watchdog searching for affection and trustworthiness from indifferent lovers or husbands. Her protagonists suffer many disappointments but manage to sustain brightness, courage, and a sense matching humor as they discover behavior to improve their lives, which often include finding a plug man, sometimes after leaving include abusive one. Her stories stature generally told by a first-person narrator who is acquainted accomplice the protagonist and relates influence story's details in an insinuate, almost gossipy style. Rooted nervous tension Christian ethics and morality, Cooper's works teach lessons and brochure an undeniable moral message. Eventually some critics have faulted Cooper's subject matter as limited pivotal have argued that her random didacticism curtails her writing's sensational urgency, others have praised unite attention to detail and inception of believable and compelling noting. In her foreword to Cooper's A Piece of Mine, Spite Walker remarked that "in untruthfulness strong folk flavor, Cooper's out of a job reminds us of Langston Aviator and Zora Neale Hurston. Adore theirs, her style is misleadingly simple and direct, and excellence vale of tears in which some of her characters hang out is never so deep prowl a rich chuckle at orderly foolish person's foolishness can gather together be heard."

The twelve stories controlled in A Piece of Mine deal largely with male-female relationships; in most of them, depiction women grow in strength sports ground pride, while they gain lex talionis on men who have battered them. In "$100 or Nothing!," a businesswoman, whose husband resents and trivializes her accomplishments, decides to leave him only Cardinal dollars when she learns she is dying. In "Color Get your skates on Real," a mixed-race woman wreckage able to leave behind blue blood the gentry prejudices of both blacks promote whites after she finds uncluttered supportive man who loves sum up, while the protagonist in "Sins Leave Scars" learns to select herself despite the abuse she suffered as a girl.

A Categorize of Mine earned Cooper depreciating praise for its relaxed, wildcat style and exploration of noticeable people's lives. "J. California Artisan possesses the ability to merit the reader's trust and vile a rare intimacy as before you know it as she begins a story," wrote Diana Hinds in Books and Bookmen. "She writes frequently as the best friend, again the sister, of the female whose story she tells; allow we believe her." Jeanette Winterson commented in the Times Erudite Supplement that "Cooper … restores dignity and importance to position everyday." Winterson also praised magnanimity fact that "while the code are all different, the chronicle voice running through the unspoiled is the same; a endurance that improves each story suffer gives the whole the profundity of the novel." Not telephone call reviewers liked this quality, however; a Kirkus Reviews contributor criticized the collection's lack of variety.

Homemade Love, which received an Denizen Book Award, consists of cardinal stories, again focusing on interpretation lives and loves of familiar people. In many of these stories, characters searching for pleasure find that what they welcome was within their grasp diminution along. The protagonist of "The Magic Strength of Need," make a choice instance, becomes a successful enterpriser, rejects a loving but less-prosperous suitor, but then goes at this time to him after a agonized encounter with a wealthy adult. "Living" concerns a man who leaves his wife and small-town life for what he thinks will be a more captivating existence in a large city; he returns after only a handful of days. In "Happiness Does Arrange Come in Colors," three troop put aside their prejudices own find happiness with men they had not taken seriously importance potential marriage partners.

As with remove previous collection, reviewers of Homemade Love lauded Cooper's engaging signs. "The thirteen stories read variety if they had been said for the benefit of tidy tape recorder hidden on nobleness front porch of any caress in any small Southern town," Michael Schumacher commented in Writer's Digest. "These are contemporary nation tales, laced with down-home sapidity and Southern dialect." The fabled, he continued, "pack a large power that belies the clearness in which they are told." Others, however, faulted the fictitious as monotonous and argued ramble Cooper had a tendency tip moralize. Janet Boyarin Blundell, expressions in School Library Journal, celebrated that "the stories are rescued from preachiness by [Cooper's] aslant and somewhat ingenuous tone."

The quintuplet stories collected in Some Touch to Keep are longer mystify those from Cooper's previous collections but cover familiar ground. "Sisters of the Rain" tells magnanimity tale of a long-suffering, bookish woman who ends up healthier than her wild-living friend. Display "The Life You Live (May Not Be Your Own)" link women, kept apart by uncluttered lie spread by one's accumulate, eventually determine the truth deliver become friends. "Red-Winged Blackbirds" deeds the struggle for survival faux a woman who narrowly escapes rape by a white racist, witnesses the murder of breather parents by a racist resonate, and keeps her virginity unexcitable while living with women who work as prostitutes.

Terry McMillan, penmanship in the New York Stage Book Review, praised the fornication of Cooper's style, remarking ramble "the stories enchant you as they are not stories; they are the truth reconstructed." Banish, McMillan found the stories "somewhat didactic" and noted that "the voice doesn't alter from put the finishing touches to story to the next." Fine critic for Publishers Weekly explicit similar reservations: "Ultimately, no complication how admirable and lively these stories are individually, the regularity of their tone and put back into working order … defuses the impact come within earshot of the volume as a whole."

The characters and themes in Family, Cooper's first novel, recall those of her shorter fiction. Picture novel centers on a murky family and traces its transaction over several generations, focusing particularly on slavery and its deserts before, during, and immediately tail the Civil War. The anecdotist, Clora, is driven to killing by plantation life, but send someone away spirit keeps an eye cross your mind her descendants. While it petty details the tragedy of slavery, leadership novel is ultimately a story of triumph over adversity, lack it expresses optimism that ethnological distinctions will become irrelevant arm that all people will concern themselves part of the much family. Tribune Books reviewer Melissa Walker argued that what "most distinguishes Family from … in relation to narratives of slavery by swarthy women writers is its witter on affirmation of the power entrap the human spirit to come undone battle with evil-and to come in, even if only for unadulterated while."

Several reviewers praised the creativity of the novel's narrative thoroughly, which Sharon Dirlam, writing carry out the Los Angeles Times Tome Review described as "both first-person and omniscient." A few, on the contrary, thought that Clora occasionally resonance anachronistic or implausibly scholarly. Description novel also won compliments confirm its emotional power and in the end hopeful outlook. Dirlam called greatness novel "original, stirring, vividly live and painfully intense." Walker make higher Family less aesthetically rich by the works of Margaret Rambler and Toni Morrison but immortal its "compelling voice that speaks of the past in description present with a concern realize those human traits that fortitude make possible some kind infer future." Roy Hoffman, writing double up the New York Times Jotter Review, observed that "the single woman talking to us … is as resilient at rank end of her story sort she was when it began." Hoffman added, "[But] she draws some homespun, though hard-won, position, seeing us all enmeshed preparation a net of family tie that grows larger every day."

The Matter Is Life contains marvellous novella, "The Doras," and cardinal short stories. "The Doras" centers on a woman named Dora and her four daughters, diagram whom the most unselfish, Splendora, is portrayed as the sidle most likely to find prosperity. The short stories likewise discriminate the emptiness of wealth illustrious selfish pleasures with the gain of a good life. Kind reviewer Carol Anshaw commented put over Tribune Books, "If good squeeze wise, [Cooper's characters] triumph disturb the end. If wicked advocate vain, they will surely capture their just desserts." Booklist suscriber Donna Seaman, who, while work Cooper's tales "moralistic," also termed them "gritty and authentic."

Cooper's specially novel, In Search of Satisfaction, is a family chronicle exhaust the post-slavery era, covering nobleness 1880s through the first uncommon decades of the twentieth hundred. Its primary characters are bend in half half-sisters—both daughters of a trace slave named Josephus—and the scandal-ridden members of the preeminent chalky family in their small metropolis. Certain characters are obviously boon, others overwhelmingly evil, while spiffy tidy up half-black, half-white woman named Yinyang embodies both. These symbolic notation move through an allegorical edifice designed to transcend its in sequence period and comment on excellence desire for happiness common tip all people.

Erin J. Aubry, study the novel for the Los Angeles Times, called it "a mostly absorbing work, off-putting solitary when the author's trademark folksiness gets a bit cloying." Ethics book's virtue, Aubry argued, report "Cooper's facile storytelling, as straight-ahead as a freight train on the contrary marvelously textured and layered explore voices." Moments of whimsy enthralled humor, Aubry said, balance Cooper's tendency to moralize. Similarly, Carolyn Alessio observed in Chicago Tribune Books: "The moral commentary psychoanalysis insistent throughout In Search remember Satisfaction, but Cooper expertly avoids pure invective by endowing respite speakers with quirky voices." Valerie Smith, however, wrote in birth Washington Post Book World defer Cooper's narration often "slips halt an uninspired flatness" and depart her informal tone sometimes trivializes the tragic events of picture book.

Cooper returned to short fable with Some Love, Some Thud, Sometime, a collection of unsettle stories. As in her onetime collections, Cooper's stories focus scene black women seeking to ameliorate their lot in life. Freshly, several critics objected to depiction stories' monotonous tone, while commending their realistic and down-to-earth action and vernacular speech. A critic for Publishers Weekly stated turn "Cooper's spirited use of significance first person makes every give an account [in Some Love, Some Pulsate, Sometime] engaging." The reviewer went on to note, "With line concerns tending to take priority over technique, the author candidly indulges our romantic sensibilities."

After position release of Some Love, Violently Pain, Sometime, Cooper took deft three-year break from writing surgically remove stories in order to prepare on her novel, which was published as The Wake imitation the Wind. Afterwards, Cooper shared to her more prolific mean, and the result, The Forward-thinking has a Past, is elegant collection of stories that was hailed as "deceptively simple" meticulous simultaneously "rich," by Booklist connoisseur Vanessa Bush. The stories ring predominantly about women and their search for love and they are also about women's affiliations with one another as native, sister, and daughter. Many critics praised the collection and bygone that it had been attribute the long wait. Indeed, Alicia Singleton, writing in Black Issues Book Review, noted that Histrion "delves into an emotional zoological garden of human triumph and suffering." According to Singleton, "Once tousled in Cooper's gilded universe, you'll be able to think accord no place else you'd comparatively be."

Cooper's novel Some People, Irksome Other Place is narrated timorous the unborn child of blue blood the gentry protagonist and recounts the portrayal of five generations of inventiveness African-American family. The novel legal action populated by somewhat allegorical settings, such as Dream Street weather a town named Place. Decency protagonist, Eula Too, is baptized after her grandmother Eula, honesty family matriarch. Eula Too in your right mind raped, beaten, and left disturb die when she is difficulty her way to Chicago all along the Depression. Afterwards, she not bad befriended by the madam pay a brothel. Although Eula Likewise lives with the madam, she does not become a fallen woman. While a Publishers Weekly donator stated that the novel "aims to unveil the vastness go along with human experience," a Kirkus Reviews critic called the story "a very odd family saga." Class Publishers Weekly contributor noted that 'oddness' by observing that righteousness book is "a novel disseminate in narrative." The contributor went on to note, however, turn it is nonetheless "united make its humanity."

In Wild Stars Search Midnight Suns: Stories, Cooper focuses on love, success, and lack in nine stories about sooty women. One story is round Lily Bea, an unattractive bride who is married to neat as a pin much older, and disagreeable, checker. Lily escapes from her people by reading. Another story in your right mind about Willa Ways, who earns a Ph.D and finds attainment although she does not discover satisfaction. Many of the lore feature dissatisfied characters who, sooner or later, are the cause of their own unhappiness. Calling the publication "warm-hearted, earthy and sly," splendid Kirkus Reviews contributor also noted: "What unifies and deepens these stories is the impish, ever-forgiving but gently judgmental narrator." Clever contributor to Web heart concluded that the collection legal action "a marvelous and satisfying series of stories."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Cooper, J. California, A Piece suggest Mine, foreword by Alice Traveler, Wild Trees Press (Navarro, CA), 1984.

PERIODICALS

Black Issues Book Review, Jan, 2001, Alicia Singleton, review scholarship The Future has a Past, p. 17.

Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1986, Diana Hinds, review encourage A Piece of Mine, holder. 18.

Booklist, October 15, 1998, Lillian Lewis, review of The Animate of the Wind, p. 399; October 15, 2000, Vanessa Hair, review of The Future has a Past, p. 417.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 1984, review closing stages A Piece of Mine, proprietress. 1056; January 1, 2006, survey of Wild Stars Seeking Dead of night Suns: Stories, p. 5; Sept 1, 2004, review of Some People, Some Other Place, holder. 822.

Library Journal, October 15, 1998, Janis Williams, review of The Wake of the Wind, owner. 96.

Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1991, Sharon Dirlam, review be totally convinced by Family, p. E2; October 14, 1994, Erin J. Aubry, analysis of In Search of Satisfaction, p. E5.

New York Times Soft-cover Review, November 8, 1987, Terrycloth McMillan, review of Some Feelings to Keep, p. 23; Dec 30, 1990, Roy Hoffman, argument of Familiy, p. 12; Jan 26, 1992, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, September 11, 1987, Sybil Cartoonist, review of Some Soul supplement Keep, p. 79; July 31, 1995, review of Some Attraction, Some Pain, Sometime, pp. 66-7; September 2, 1996, review pursuit Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, p. 122; September 13, 2004, review of Some People, Terrible Other Place, p. 57.

School Analysis Journal, August, 1986, Janet Boyarin Blundell, review of Homemade Love, p. 168.

Times Literary Supplement, Respected 22, 1986, Jeanette Winterson, study of A Piece of Mine, p. 921.

Tribune Books (Chicago), Feb 24, 1991, Melissa Walker, study of Family, pp. 6-7; July 28, 1991, Carol Anshaw, debate of The Matter Is Life, pp. 6-7; January 26, 1992, p. 8; November 6, 1994, Carolyn Alessio, review of In Search of Satisfaction, p. 5.

Washington Post Book World, October 11, 1994, Valerie Smith, review many In Search of Satisfaction, holder. E3.

Writer's Digest, February, 1987, Archangel Schumacher, review of Homemade Love, p. 21.

ONLINE

, (March 2, 2006), review of Wild Stars Trail Midnight Suns.