Novelist and poet, Joan Drescher Cooper teaches high school seniors at Salisbury’s James M. Bennett to enjoy research and wordplay. Her first collection of poetry, Birds Like Me, will debut from Finishing Line Press in October 2019. The collection catalogs life on the Eastern Shore—the natural world, the foibles of people, and the revelations found in rumination. 

Finding Home at Lilac Hill begins a series set in rural West Virginia. The novel was published through Salt Water Media of Berlin in 2014. Based on the lives of two sisters raising their families on a mountainside farm, the series explores themes of working women, the role of family, mental illness, and self-reliance. The following short story collection, Return to Lilac Hill, features the same setting but includes a Dickens-style fable, a journey of discovery, and a fictionalized true-crime story with a supernatural edge. Published in 2016, Lilac Hill Folly extends the theme of the supernatural along with fictionalized true-crime as a prodigal returns home and stirs up ghosts.