Videos

Grade Level

Series

Promoting a love of reading

Cooper talks about her role on the board of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance (NCBLA), detailing the important work NCBLA does in promoting books, libraries, and literacy.

Writing for young children

When Cooper writes for very young children, she often has a specific audience in mind, like her own children or grandchildren.

What if?

The secret to getting kids to write is to startle them into thinking outside the box.

Where the imagination lives

There’s a little room in your head which has a door with no handle. It is fed by everything you remember about what you have thought, done, everybody you’ve met, everything you’ve read.

A longing for place

Cooper brings to life many of the places she visited and lived in as a child in England.

Imagining Dark Is Rising

Cooper wrote down the last half page of the very last book in the Dark Is Rising series and then put it away.

Enchanted by Merlin

Cooper’s first published book, Over Sea, Under Stone, started out as an adventure story but took a left turn when Cooper realized that what she really wanted to write was fantasy.

At 27, Cooper abruptly left England to marry an American with three teenage children. Homesickness inspired her to write about the experience of living in the U.S. and an autobiographical book about growing up in England during World War II.