Nicole Amy Cooke is an African-American librarian and the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair at the University of South Carolina.
[1] Cooke was a librarian for 13 years before pursuing her Ph.D.[1] She was part of the first cohort of the American Library Association Spectrum doctoral fellows during her program at Rutgers.
Cooke felt it would be "tantamount to malpractice" to send library students into the workforce without educating them about social justice issues.
Right wing outlet Campus Reform published a story about her project, called "Minority Student Experiences with Racial Microaggressions in the Academic Library," and Cooke received harassment as a result of their publication.
[8] In 2019, Cooke was awarded the Augusta Baker Chair in Childhood Literacy in the School of Information Science at the University of South Carolina.