Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors

by Desiree Cooper (Contributor), Tommye Blount (Contributor), Justin Boggués (Contributor)

224 pages, Paperback

Published April 21, 2026

About the author

In Know the Mother, Cooper explores how sexism and racism continue to uncoil in the midst of life's most intimate moments. A former journalist and Pulitzer Prize-nominated columnist for the Detroit Free Press, Cooper uses the compressed form of "flash fiction" to tell an entire story. Slipping between poetry and prose, the 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow takes the reader to places where race and gender are unexpected interlopers--from a traditional Japanese market where a black woman shops with her newborn, to a law office where a woman miscarries during a conference call, to the middle of the night when spirits arrive for dinner.