Sunday May 31 from 2-4 PM join us at the Oak Park Public Library for a presentation of Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors with book editor Desiree Cooper, journalist Cassandra Spratling and activist Angela Atabex Lugo-Thomas. This event is free and sponsored by Book Beat with the Oak Park Library.
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.
“Though racism often intrudes, Cooper’s deftly curated collection of stories, poems, and drawings by Detroiters illustrates the best of urban summer life, its joys, fragility, and resonance.”
–Booklist
“Magnificently curated by Desiree Cooper, this collection is full. Like summers growing up in the urban outdoors. Like the feelings of Black people navigating Detroit’s public space. In all its insightful recollections and creative variety, Black Summers is full of pleasure, of pain, of splendor, of struggle, of home.”
-Ibram X. Kendi, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller How to Be an Antiracist
“Black Summers is beaches, backyards, bikes, basketball courts, and bigotry. This meditative collection of multigenerational prose and poetry is more than memories; it is a beautifully intricate testimony.”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Cassandra Spratling, Desiree Cooper and Angela Atabex Lugo-Thomas
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Detroit, Angela Atabex Lugo-Thomas is a land cultivator, emerging journalist, and community leader. For her work in Planet Detroit, Lugo-Thomas won first place for racial justice reporting in 2024 from the Society of Professional Journalists–Detroit Chapter and a 2019 Documenting Detroit Fellowship for photojournalism project, Highland Park: Back on the Map. Lugo-Thomas is the CEO of Liberty Plaza, an adaptive reuse housing development in Highland Park, Michigan, and co-director of La Casita Cimarrón y Yuketi de Detroit, a community space for Puerto Rican arts and culture. A former board member of the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, she is the recipient of the Spirit of Determination Award from the Joe Louis Greenway Partnership. A founding company dancer of the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, she now serves as a member of the Belle Isle Park advisory committee.
Cassandra Spratling is an award-winning writer who has written for the Detroit Free Press, National Geographic, BLAC Magazine, Crain’s Detroit Business, and Visit Detroit magazine. In 2016, her Detroit Free Press series, “Countdown to 60,” was named best feature story in “The Salute to Excellence Awards” of the National Association of Black Journalists. The series included Spratling’s account of biking from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the voting rights march. Retired from the Detroit Free Press, she continues to do freelance writing, but her favorite job now is helping to care for her first grandchild, Love Ayomi Kikelomo Williams.
Desiree Cooper is an attorney and former Pulitzer Prize–nominated, Detroit Free Press columnist. Her first published short story, “Night Coming,” appeared in Detroit Noir (2007) and was later included in Best African American Fiction 2010, selected by Nikki Giovanni (2010). Since then, she has published two books with Detroit’s Wayne State University Press: her acclaimed collection of flash fiction Know the Mother (2016) and the picture book Nothing Special (2022), one of the New York Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.” Her essays and stories have been widely published, including in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America 2023. She has received three nominations for the Pushcart Prize. A 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow, Cooper now lives in coastal Virginia, but remains a Detroiter at heart. descooper.com