Deborah Copaken Kogan Speaker & Booking Information

Deborah Copaken Kogan began her career as a Paris-based photojournalist, covering conflicts in such war-torn areas as Afghanistan, Israel, and the former Soviet Union from 1988 to 1992, the subject of her best-selling memoir Shutterbabe. She then spent six years as an Emmy Award-winning television producer, first for ABC News, then at Dateline NBC. Her writing, photography, and documentary work have since appeared in many places, including the New Yorker and the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and on CNN. When she moved to Manhattan to raise a family and write, she thought she'd left war battlefields behind. She was wrong. Hell is Other Parents (Hyperion) is a witty, sanguine - and at times, laugh-out-loud - romp through the landmines of modern working parenthood, as Kogan continually finds herself at odds with the competitive, aggressive, and sometimes woefully misguided helicopter parents in her midst. A frequent performer with the New York-based storytelling group, The Moth, and with the LA-based comedy troupe, Afterbirth, she lectures at colleges and universities throughout the US.

An urban zoologist with a sense of humor, Kogan charts the rich emotional terrain of the parenting landmine in her Hell is Other Parents hilarious talks and performances (part comedy, part sobering discussion about the nature of parental interference and learning to let go). She is a fish out of today's millennial parenting water, her feelings of inadequacy further exacerbated by her unsought role as stage mother to her actor son, Jacob (young Spock in the recently released Star Trek film), a parenting universe so beyond normal it often veers toward science fiction. Kogan explores rough patches in her marriage, struggles to pay her Manhattan rent on inadequate income, raises an unexpected third child a decade after numbers one and two, and tries to shrug off the sideways glances and judgmental comments she continually faces while shuttling her kids around the city on a Vespa.

Kogan began her professional career as a teenager, writing book reviews and essays for Seventeen, as well as acting in the film Key Exchange. After graduating from Harvard in 1988, she moved to Paris and worked for several years as a photojournalist, shooting conflicts and upheavals in such regions as Afghanistan, Israel, Romania, Zimbabwe, and the Soviet Union, as well as documenting, both in the US and abroad, the every day violence of girl gangs, street crime, and drug addiction for publications such as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Photo, Stern, Geo, L'Express, Libération, and Paris Match. Her award-winning photographs have been exhibited in galleries in Paris and Perpignan, France, as well as in Cargese, Corsica, New York City, and Cambridge, MA.

After retiring from combat photography, she spent the next six years producing television news, first for ABC News' Day One, where she received an Emmy, then as a producer for Dateline NBC. She then returned to writing full time, publishing her best-selling memoir, Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War (Random House 2002), which won a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and is being adapted for the screen by the producers of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and director Jose Padilha (Elite Squad), as well as contributing articles and essays to publications such as The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Self, Elle, Paris Match, and The Huffington Post. She shot a documentary for CNN on her trip to Pakistan with her then six-year-old son in the wake of 9/11.

Kogan still works as a professional portrait photographer, and her TV pilot, "The Good Egg," is currently in pre-production with The New York Office. Her first novel, Between Here and April, was published in October of 2008 to great critical acclaim, winning the Elle Readers Prize in November. She lives in Harlem, NY with her husband and three children.