About the Author

Patrick Desmond Cooper, a native of Jamaica, has lived in the United States since 1978 and is a naturalized American citizen. He currently resides in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Juin. They have three adult children: Gregory, Rachel and Charles, and two grandchildren, Ashley and Alexa; a third is on the way.

Mr. Cooper has been a writer his entire adult life. Black Superman, completed in 2003 after ten years of research and writing, was his first book. He has just completed a historical novel, The Pillars of Heaven and Earth, and is currently working on a memoir about Jamaica.

Mr. Cooper began his professional career as a journalist on the sports desk of the Gleaner, the oldest and largest newspaper in the British Caribbean. His long and varied career also includes stints in advertising, business and politics. In 1968 he was hired as the first fulltime Public Relations Director of the People’s National Party (PNP), which has governed Jamaica for much of the last thirty-six years, and as Editor of its then startup newspaper, The New Nation. That same year Mr. Cooper spent the final two months of the Presidential Election Campaign in Washington, working with the speechwriting team of the Democratic Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Edmund Muskie.

As part of his responsibilities, Mr. Cooper served as an aide to N.W.Manley and then to his son Michael, who succeeded his father as President of the PNP. The elder Manley, widely regarded as the founder of modern Jamaica, is one of Jamaica’s six National Heroes. Both father and son were Prime Ministers of Jamaica.

In 1972 Mr. Cooper was elected to the PNP’S Executive Committee and became the chairman of the Public Affairs Committee. In that position he worked closely with Michael Manley and P.J. Patterson, the country’s longest-serving Prime Ministers.

Mr. Cooper, who owned and operated his own advertising agency in conjunction with his wife from 1971 until their departure from Jamaica, also represented the country at the United Nations and in Africa.

In the United States Mr. Cooper has worked, primarily, as an advertising copywriter in New York, Houston and Austin. For several years, he and his wife owned a cosmetics company, Juin-Rachel, which was distributed nationally in the country’s leading department and specialty stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Macys. Juin-Rachel was the first and is still the only cosmetics line aimed primarily at a nonwhite customer to be carried in Saks’ main store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Mr. Cooper first began thinking about the subject matter of Black Superman shortly after his arrival in the United States. It was during the long hours that he watched and tried to decipher the intricacies of football, baseball and basketball that he first became convinced that the differences between black and white athletes, in both substance and style, were too pronounced to be explained by culture alone.