CJ Cook

C. J. Cook is an award-winning author and historian whose work focuses on the art, artists, and cultural history of the South Pacific. His first book, Tyree, Artist of the South Pacific (2017), received two Gold Awards from the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) for Best Cover and Best Biography in 2018.

His second biography, Leeteg, Babes, Bars, Beaches, and Black Velvet Art, earned the IBPA Gold Medal for Best Biography in 2022. In 2023, Cook published Beauty in the Beast: The Flora, Fauna, and Endangered Species of Artist Ralph Burke Tyree, followed by Edithe Beutler, Beautifying Hawaii with Color, the first full biography of the pioneering colorist and entrepreneur whose hand-painted photographs helped define Hawaiʻi’s early visual identity.

This biography of Robert Lee Eskridge is Cook’s most ambitious work to date—an expansive, richly illustrated volume spanning more than 350 pages and 450 images, including over 200 works by Eskridge, and offering the most comprehensive account yet of the artist’s remarkable life and legacy.