Bio

Elisha Cooper received a Caldecott Honor in 2018 for Big Cat, Little Cat, and his following book River won the 2020 Robin Smith Picture Book Prize. One of his earlier books, Dance!, was a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year, and Beach won the Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. In 2016 he was awarded a Sendak Fellowship.

After playing football at Yale, where he majored in History, Cooper worked at The New Yorker Magazine. He published his first book, a sketchbook of New York, then followed his wife on her academic trajectory to California, then Chicago, before returning to New York, where she is a professor at NYU. He has written twenty-five books, mostly for children, and also books for adults including the family memoirs Crawling: A Father’s First Year, and Falling: A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back. His essays and sketchbooks have appeared in the sports section of The New York Times. Cooper lives with his wife, daughters, and cats in New York City.

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Photo by Christopher Smith