Discover the Best Books Written by Sarah Cooper

Sarah Anne Cooper (born December 19, 1977) is an American author and comedian based in New York City. She worked in design for Yahoo! and in user experience for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides while also performing stand-up comedy. Cooper left Google to focus full-time on writing and comedy. Her first two books, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings and Draw What Success Looks Like, was published in 2016. Her third book, How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings, was published in 2018.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cooper began uploading videos of herself lip-syncing statements made by Donald Trump. The success of these led to appearances on several talk shows, and in October 2020, her show Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine premiered on Netflix. Cooper was born in Jamaica in 1977. One of her grandmothers was Chinese-Jamaican. Her family moved to Rockville, Maryland, in 1980. Her father worked as an electrical engineer for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in nearby Washington, and her mother worked in the human resources department of a consulting company. 

Cooper was already interested in show business as a teenager and originally intended to study theater. However, following the wishes of her parents, she first pursued studies outside of show business. She earned degrees in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and in digital design from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Cooper began performing stand-up comedy in Atlanta while she was working as a visual designer at Yahoo! Later. 

At the same time, she was a user experience designer for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides; she continued to write and perform stand-ups and met her former husband, Jeff Palm, who was an engineer on Google Docs. She has said that she would analyze Stephen Colbert's monologues from The Colbert Report to understand what made them humorous. In 2006, Cooper created and starred in a short-lived YouTube web series, The Bubble, which lasted only three four-minute episodes. In 2014, she wrote a blog post called "10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings" that went viral with five million views. Later that year, she left Google to pursue writing and comedy full-time.

Her first book, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, a satirical version of a self-help book, was published on October 4, 2016. Her "coloring and activity book," Draw What Success Looks Like, was published in the same month. Her third book, How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings, was published on October 30, 2018. It is subtitled "Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women" and contains satirical advice for women, such as "Pepper your emails with exclamation marks and emojis... Your lack of efficient communication will make you seem more approachable." Her books were not commercially successful. At the end of 2019, five years after she had resigned from Google, Cooper was considering quitting her comedy career due to lack of success.