Rich Paul Cooper is a researcher, educator, and novelist from south Louisiana, where he is active in the French and Creole language revitalization movements. His first novel, titled Le Drac du Meschacébé (2025), is the first novel written in Louisiana French in over 130 years, and it has been adopted by immersion schools and university classrooms devoted to the preservation and study of Louisiana French. When he is not publishing fiction or peer-reviewed articles about Louisiana literature, folklore, and culture, he is writing about film. His most recent peer-reviewed article analyzes Neptune Frost (2021), a queer African sci-fi musical.