Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. 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.

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.