Erna Cooper is a writer and portrait artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She studied fine art and drama at NYU, and is a graduate of UCLA (English) and Oxford University (Modern Languages). She has written and produced theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and has worked as a translator and freelance journalist in the US and Europe, publishing her work on BBC radio, in World Literature Today, and the Austrian Times. Erna has published fiction non-fiction books and adapted screenplays. Her new work, Chiaroscuro: Aesthetics, Values and Autobiography in Willa Cather and Marguerite Duras will be published by Peter Lang’s Cultural Identities Series in 2016. (Portrait of Erna Cooper by Robert Voltaire.)