March 27, 2019
Carolyn Cooke
Professor
Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing
School of Consciousness and Transformation
Current Research
This February Carolyn Cooke completed a year-and-a-half long project entitled Fire City. She co-wrote the script with Alex Burger, who teaches screenwriting in the MFA Program, and was, most recently, the showrunner for Umlilo, the wildly popular Zulu Clan drama.
Fire City is inspired by the spectacle of Burning Man, the temporary city built every year in the Nevada Desert with the seemingly paradoxical aims of encouraging anarchy and empathy, building and burning. The show begins with a quarantine in the Nevada desert that quickly embraces other containers: a tribal reservation sequestered for 130 years, the first colonists hurtling rocket-bound toward Mars, and human beings trapped on a troubled earth where the Greenland Ice Sheet's on fire.
Fire City is currently being pitched to studio executives in Hollywood.
Past Research
Carolyn Cooke is an award-winning writer and author. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, Gargoyle, The Gettysburg Review, The Idaho Review, Mission at Tenth Inter-Arts Journal, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly and in two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and The PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and The Nation. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Djerassi Foundation, Macdowell, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Studio Center and the Corporation of Yaddo, she teaches in the interdisciplinary MFA Programs at CIIS.
Read Carolyn Cooke's bio.
