Deborah Copaken

Deborah Copaken (born March 11, 1966) is an American author and photojournalist. The New York Times described her in 2000 as "a media powerbabe."

She was born Deborah Elizabeth Copaken in Boston. The daughter of Marjorie Ann (née Schwartz) and Richard Daniel Copaken, who served as a White House Fellow for President Lyndon B. Johnson, she grew up in Maryland, first in Adelphi and then from 1970 in Potomac. She attended Harvard University.

As an adult, Copaken has lived in Paris and Moscow before moving to New York in 1992. She and former spouse Paul M. Kogan have three children, including actor Jacob Kogan.

Prior to beginning a writing career, Copaken was a television producer at ABC and NBC and a war photographer. Her novel Between Here and April was published in 2008 and won the November Elle Reader's Prize. In 2009, she released a book of comic essays, Hell is Other Parents, some of which appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times. In 2001, she published a memoir of her experiences in photojournalism, Shutterbabe. Her second novel, The Red Book, published by Hyperion/VOICE in April 2012, was a New York Times bestseller. The book was longlisted for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. Writing in The Washington Post, Curtis Sittenfeld found the book “in equal measures clever and nauseating," adding, “Kogan’s writing is at its best enjoyably breezy but at its worst glib.”

Inspired by the longlisting of her novel, Copaken in 2013 wrote an essay for The Nation detailing sexism she has encountered and observed in her career. Among other issues, she wrote that she was forced to use the titles under which her earlier books appeared, and that she was raped on the eve of her graduation from college.

She has performed and curated live storytelling for The Moth; she has also performed on the New York stage with Afterbirth, the Six Word Memoir series. She is currently adapting Shutterbabe as a TV series for NBC.

In February 2015, following a hysterectomy, she conducted a performance piece titled "A Dear John Letter To My Uterus" at Joe's Pub in Manhattan.