Kristin Cooper

Kristin Cooper (née Bernhardt; born July 19, 1956) is an American lawyer who served as First Lady of North Carolina from 2017 to 2025.

Raised in Oklahoma City, Cooper moved to North Carolina to earn a Juris Doctor from Campbell Law School in 1982. After working as a staff attorney with the North Carolina General Assembly, she married Democratic Party politician Roy Cooper. Since 2003, she has worked professionally as a guardian ad litem for foster children.

Roy Cooper was elected governor of North Carolina in 2016. Kristin Cooper, as the North Carolina First Lady, expanded the scope of her role and focused on issues such as child poverty, hunger, literacy, and abuse, as well as the arts.

Early life and education

Cooper was born on July 19, 1956, to Geri Bernhardt, an artist, and Captain Samuel C. Bernhardt, a physician and Vietnam veteran who served with the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Vietnam War. She grew up with three younger sisters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and attended public schools.

She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Oklahoma, where she was a member of Alpha Phi. After moving to North Carolina, she graduated with a Juris Doctor from Campbell University's Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law in 1982. She later said that law school represented the only possible educational path, besides becoming a professor, that combined her multipotential interests in reading, writing, and history. Cooper has said that neglect is the reason that children enter the foster system; furthermore, she said, neglect is often due to poverty, and poverty from illiteracy. She also said that children should be well-nourished when they go to school. Discussing children's well-being, she said: "So many of these issues are easier to address—and change is easier to implement—when they are young children rather than waiting until later." They later married and raised three children, Hilary, Claire, and Natalie, in Rocky Mount, Nash County.

Roy Cooper was first elected as a state representative and then was appointed to the state senate, where he eventually became the Democratic majority leader. From 2001 to 2017, he was North Carolina Attorney General. To live closer to the attorney general's office, the Cooper family moved to Raleigh, the state capital, after Hilary graduated from high school. As first lady, Cooper moderated a panel discussion with female Wake County youth leaders after RLT's premiere of Grace for President in October 2017.

Cooper has described herself as an amateur gardener and birdwatcher; she said she cultivated an interest in birding during the 1996 extreme weather event that snowed her in with three children, "a big window and a pair of binoculars and a field guide". Cooper has also led a knitting circle, a hobby she said her great-grandmother enjoyed. Their praying mantis, Fred, died in June 2017 and was replaced by an orchid mantis Daisy.

First Lady of North Carolina

In 2016, Roy Cooper ran for Governor of North Carolina and was elected over Republican incumbent Pat McCrory. Kristin Cooper held a Bible under the new governor's hand when he was ceremonially sworn in on January 6. Her blue floor-length taffeta gown for the inaugural ball, designed by C.J. Bostrom of Charlotte, was by custom donated to the North Carolina Museum of History.

Writer Leah Whitt described Cooper's character as first lady as "a blend of the proper Southern hostess and a rebel". Cooper set a goal to make meaningful visits to all 100 counties of North Carolina by 2020 and, as she has said, to bring advice from those visits back to her husband. In an interview with Spectrum News in September 2017, the first lady was asked about her legacy. She said: "I hope they remember that I genuinely care about this state. ... I don't want to be remembered as somebody who stayed up in Raleigh and went to parties. I want to meet people, and see what interests them ... and what challenges they face. I am finding out that we are more alike than different." In 2017, she made visits to 27 counties and planned to see 25 more in 2018, at every stop taking questions from local officials and the public.

As directed by Cooper, the first lady's administrative office expanded its scope to draw attention to issues such as the arts, foster care, and child literacy, hunger, abuse and neglect. In Alamance County, she said: "While [political] parties may disagree on spending to support families, things like encouraging kids to read and teaching parents how to parent costs practically nothing, and has a huge impact." In her first month as first lady, Cooper supported and was a celebrity reader at the launch of the Wake Up and Read book drive for low-income children in Wake County. She has praised Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which sends a new book every month to children under five, and for which the General Assembly allocated $3.5 million in 2017. In November 2017, she and celebrity chef Vivian Howard hosted a lunch in Kinston to raise funds for the program.

The first lady joined the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina to establish the Stop Summer Hunger program, which helps sustain about 300,000 children when school is out of session. and has seen several North Carolina public schools that provide breakfast to students.

In August 2018, along Interstate 95, Cooper commemorated the 50th anniversary of North Carolina's highway welcome centers. At the event, the first lady said, "A big smile and a warm welcome continue to be the hallmark of North Carolina's famous hospitality."