Quick Facts
Biography
Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian, podcast host, exhibition curator and tv commenter. She is a fellow at New America and the author of Alice and Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (2014) and the New York Times best-selling You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington (2020).
Career
Coe was an oral historian for the Brooklyn Historical Society while in graduate school. She was a research curator in the New York Public Library’s exhibitions department where she co-curated "Find the Past, Know the Future," the most popular exhibition in the Library's history.
Coe has been published in The New York Times,The Atlantic, Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine.
Coe published Alice and Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis in 2014. In 2016, Coe co-hosted the podcast Presidents Are People Too!. In 2018, she hosted the podcast, No Man's Land, which won a Webby award for Best Series.
In 2020, Coe published You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington, making her the first woman biographer to publish a biography of Washington in over a century. The book became a New York Times best-seller in February 2020 and was widely praised as genre-breaking.
Coe produced and starred in The History Channel's Washington series with Doris Kearns Goodwin.
In 2023, she spoke on CBS News about the historical significance of the Indictment of Donald Trump.
Coe is a fellow at New America, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
Personal life
Coe was raised in Los Angeles, California. She moved to New York to go to Columbia and Sarah Lawrence. She has written about her grandparents, who helped raise her. She called her paternal grandfather "Daddy Hal" and cared for her grandmother at the end of her life. Coe shared a birthday with her maternal grandfather, who is her daughter's namesake. She has an older brother.
Coe is a single mother who lives outside of New York City with her young daughter.
Bibliography
- Coe, Alexis (2014). Alice and Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis. Pulp/Zest. ISBN 9781936976607. OCLC 1051071944.
- Coe, Alexis (2021). You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington. Penguin Random House. ISBN 9780735224117. OCLC 1247158274.
