African American author and playwright J. California Cooper passed away on Saturday, September 20, 2014, in her home of Seattle, Washington. She was 82 years old.
"I was telling stories before I could write," Cooper once said. "I like to tell stories, and I like to talk to things. If you've read fairy tales, you know that everything can talk, from trees to chairs to tables to brooms. So I grew up thinking that, and I turned it into stories."
Cooper had already experienced quite a bit of success as a dramatist, even winning the 1978 Black Playwright Award, when Alice Walker attended a performance of one of Cooper's plays and suggested she switch to fiction, instead.
"'[Walker's] advice to my mother was you should write short stories or novels because it was easier to get paid,'" said Paris Williams, Cooper's daughter, in an interview published September 23.
