Congratulations to Family Action Network (FAN) on their 40^th anniversary season!

We are pleased to collaborate with FAN as they welcome Christian Cooper, author of the new book, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Cooper will be interviewed by Natalie Y. Moore. This virtual event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Click HERE to reserve your spot!

This event will be recorded and available later on the FAN website and YouTube channel.

AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy of Better Living Through Birding from The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Cooper that will start immediately after the webinar. The link to register for the AFTER-HOURS program will appear in red font at the top of an email from The Book Stall. Look for it right after your receipt arrives!

About the Book: Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

In Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

About the Author: Christian Cooper is a science and comics writer and editor, and the host and consulting producer of Extraordinary Birder on National Geographic. His new book is Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, released in June 2023. Cooper was one of Marvel Comic’s first openly gay writers and editors and introduced the first gay male character in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. He also introduced the first openly lesbian character for Marvel and created and authored Queer Nation: The Online Gay Comic. Based in New York City, he is on the board of directors for NYC Audubon. Cooper received his AB degree from Harvard College in 1984.

About the Interviewer: Natalie Y. Moore is an award-winning journalist covering segregation and inequality for WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate. Her enterprise reporting has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Moore’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Moore's latest book is The Billboard, a play about abortion, published by Haymarket Books. Her acclaimed book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation received the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and was Buzzfeed’s best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation. Moore contributed to “Southside,” a collection of stories about the criminal justice system in Chicago in collaboration with The Marshall Project/Amazon Original Stories in 2018. For the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago riots, she co-wrote a 30-minute audio drama with Make Believe Association that aired on WBEZ. 16th Street Theater adapted portions of “The South Side” in 2019. Moore is a 2021 USA Fellow. The Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting. In 2021, the University of Chicago Center for Effective Government (CEG), based at the U. of C.’s Harris School of Public Policy, welcomed her in its first cohort of Senior Practitioner Fellows.