About
Christina Cooke is a freelance writer, university writing instructor, editor and copyeditor, and former newspaper reporter who loves nothing more than finding and telling stories.
She worked two years as a staff writer at the Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee covering K-12 education and such topics as school board decisions and teenage pregnancy. She won the newspaper a first-place award from the state press association for the quality of her coverage.
As a freelance writer, Cooke has published with the New Yorker (here), The Oregonian, Willamette Week, Oregon Business Magazine, the Greensboro News and Record, Salt Magazine, Clamor Magazine, Port City Life and Patagonia Black Sheep. In addition, she revised the forthcoming Fodor’s travel guidebook to Portland, Oregon.
Cooke is most interested in writing about people, places, cultural phenomenon, travel and outdoor adventure. She find often finds herself drawn to tell stories at the fringes of society, about people who are offbeat and unconventional, passionate and obsessed, and masters of their own, very specialized domains. She hopes her writing makes readers curious about people and places they might have overlooked before, puts faces on complex social, cultural and environmental issues and deepens her readers’ understanding of their connections to one another and place.
Cooke received her MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Portland State University and studied in the documentary writing program at the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. She teaches journalism and nonfiction writing in the documentary studies program at Lewis & Clark College.
In 2007 and 2008, Cooke lived and worked in Torres del Paine National Park in the Chilean Patagonia, at the far southern tip of South America, where she immersed herself in the Chilean culture, drinking matte with the gauchos before work, helping herd sheep across the steppe on horseback and attending jiniteadas, or traditional horse handling shows, on the weekends — all the while, keeping a travel blog called Out to See, which she still maintains today.
Cooke is represented by Tessler Literary Agency in New York City.