Becky Cooper

Last updated

Becky Cooper
BornRebecca A. Cooper
Queens, New York, U.S.
OccupationAuthor
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Harvard University
Notable works
  • Mapping Manhattan (2013)
  • We Keep the Dead Close (2020)
Notable awards Hoopes Prize (2011)

Becky Cooper is an American author best known for her nonfiction book We Keep the Dead Close (2020), an account of the long-unsolved murder of a Harvard graduate student in 1969.

Contents

Education

Cooper graduated from Harvard University off-cycle in the winter of 2010 [1] as part of the class of 2011, with an A.B. in comparative literature. Her undergraduate thesis, "Quo Vadis? The Life and Literary Philosophy of David Foster Wallace," won Harvard's $4,000 Hoopes Prize, awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work or research by students. [2] Cooper was later a senior fellow at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. [3]

Career

Before becoming an author, Cooper worked as a research assistant, helped make a documentary about giving socks to homeless youth, and traveled to France for a job as a paralegal. [1] After returning to the U.S., she became a member of The New Yorker ′s editorial staff, where she contributed 19 restaurant and bar reviews to the "Goings On About Town" section published between July 2015 and May 2017, [4] and served as assistant to the magazine's editor, David Remnick. [5] In April 2017, she left The New Yorker to focus full time on researching an unsolved murder that had intrigued her since 2009. After embarking on a two-week archeological dig in Bulgaria (the murder victim being a Harvard graduate student of archaeology), Cooper took up residence on Harvard's campus and began writing a book about the case. [1]

Books

Cooper's first book, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers (2013), recounts her journey walking the length of Broadway, and includes 75 maps from both anonymous mapmakers and notable New Yorkers such as The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov and Tony Award-winning actor Harvey Fierstein. The book grew out of a collaborative art project, for which Cooper created a Tumblr blog in 2009 [6] that invited strangers to fill out a blank map of Manhattan with their own memories and submit it for consideration.

Cooper's second book, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence (2020), is the true story of Jane Britton, a graduate student of Near Eastern archaeology in Harvard's anthropology department who, at age 23 in 1969, was bludgeoned to death in her off-campus apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The title is taken from a talk by a Harvard professor, rumored to be involved in the case, who said of a prehistoric culture that buried the dead under their houses, "The dead are kept close to you." [7] Cooper was struck by the ambiguity of keeping human remains close as suggesting either respectful remembrance or attempted cover-up. [8] In completing this work, she received support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists, and the Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors Program. [3]

Related Research Articles

<i>In Cold Blood</i> Novel by Truman Capote

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by the American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tina Brown</span> British-American journalist

Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans, is an English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast. From 1998 to 2002, Brown was chairman of Talk Media, which included Talk Magazine and Talk Miramax Books. In 2010, she founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to elevate the voices of women globally, with summits held through 2019. Brown is author of The Diana Chronicles (2007), The Vanity Fair Diaries (2017) and The Palace Papers (2022).

James Bennett Stewart is an American lawyer, journalist, and author.

Renata Adler is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker for over thirty years and the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1968 to 1969. She has also published several fiction and non-fiction books, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child, he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Toobin</span> American lawyer and author

Jeffrey Ross Toobin is an American lawyer, author, blogger, and legal analyst for CNN.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Amy Mihaljevic</span> 1989 murder of an American schoolgirl

Amy Renee Mihaljevic was a ten-year-old American elementary school student who was kidnapped and murdered in the U.S. state of Ohio in 1989.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yevgenia Albats</span> Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host (born 1958)

Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Chira</span> American journalist

Susan Deborah Chira is an American journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project. Previously, Chira was a senior correspondent and editor covering gender for The New York Times. From September 2014 until September 2016, she was a deputy executive editor of the newspaper and oversaw its news report. She was previously the assistant managing editor for news, and was the Times's foreign news editor from 2004 to 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alphabet murders</span> Unsolved serial murders

The Alphabet murders are an unsolved series of child murders which occurred between 1971 and 1973 in Rochester, New York.

Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia Heffernan</span> American journalist

Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic. Since 2015, she has been a political columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a cultural columnist at Wired. From 2003 to 2011, she worked as a staff writer for The New York Times, first as a television critic, then as a magazine columnist, and then as an opinion writer. She has also worked as a senior editor for Harper's, as a founding editor of Talk, and as a TV critic for Slate. Her 2016 book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art argued that the Internet is a "massive and collective work of art", one that is a "work in progress", and that the suggested deterioration of attention spans in response to it is a myth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Betsy Aardsma</span> 1969 American murder case

The murder of Betsy Aardsma is an American murder case dating from November 1969, in which a 22-year-old graduate student was murdered by a single stab wound inside the Pattee Library at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania.

Wendy Ruderman is an American journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. She won with Barbara Laker the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Ruderman, along with Inquirer colleagues Barbara Laker and Dylan Purcell, was named a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer for local reporting for “Toxic City: Sick Schools,” which examined how environmental hazards in Philadelphia schools deprive children of healthy spaces to learn and grow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Sian O'Callaghan</span> 2011 murder in the United Kingdom

Sian Emma O'Callaghan was a 22-year-old British woman who disappeared from Swindon, Wiltshire, England, having last been seen at a nightclub in the town in the early hours of 19 March 2011. Her body was found on 24 March near Uffington in Oxfordshire. On 19 October 2012, at Bristol Crown Court, 48-year-old Christopher Halliwell pleaded guilty to O'Callaghan's murder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Reyna Marroquín</span> Salvadoran woman who was murdered in the United States in 1969

Reyna Angélica Marroquín was a Salvadoran woman who was murdered in the United States in 1969. Her murder was not discovered until 1999, thirty years later, when her body was found in the former home of Howard B. Elkins, a prominent businessman who was identified as the prime suspect. Elkins committed suicide by gunshot in the back seat of a Ford Explorer at a friend's home in Boca Raton, Florida after an interview with the police.

<i>Serial</i> (podcast) American investigative journalism podcast

Serial is an investigative journalism podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig, narrating a nonfiction story over multiple episodes. The series was co-created and is co-produced by Koenig and Julie Snyder and developed by This American Life; as of July 2020, it is owned by The New York Times.

Frank Girardot is an American author, journalist, victim advocate, and radio host. He is best known for "Name Dropper" his biography of serial imposter Christian Gerhartsreiter. He is communications director for BYD Auto's North American operations, CEO of Pegasus Communications, LLC and the former editor and columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Jane Britton</span> Killing of Harvard graduate student solved a half-century later through DNA

At 12:30 a.m. on January 7, 1969, Jane Britton, a graduate student in Near Eastern archaeology at Harvard University, left a neighbor's apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, to return to her own. The next day, after she had failed to answer her phone and missed an important exam, her boyfriend went to the apartment and found her dead. The cause of death was found to be blunt force trauma from a blow to the head; she had been raped as well.

References

  1. 1 2 3 McDougall, Maya H. (December 23, 2020). "Becky Cooper: Harvard Detective". The Harvard Crimson . Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  2. ↑ "Faculty of Arts and Sciences 2010–2011 Student Prize Recipients" (PDF). Harvard University. 2011. Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  3. 1 2 "Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowships". Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. 2018. Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  4. ↑ "Contributor – Becky Cooper". The New Yorker . May 5, 2017. Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  5. ↑ Taylor, Elise (November 10, 2020). "An Interview With the Author of We Keep the Dead Close, a Captivating True-Crime Novel About a 1969 Murder at Harvard". Vogue . Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  6. ↑ Cooper, Becky (June 2009). "Mapping Manhattan". Tumblr . Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  7. ↑ Cooper, Becky (2020). We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence. New York: Grand Central Publishing. p. 46. ISBN   978-1538746837.
  8. ↑ Wakeman, Jessica (November 2020). "Becky Cooper: True crime like you've never read it before". BookPage. Retrieved December 31, 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.