Name Jeff Coplon Books Gold buckle | Role Journalist | |
Jeff Coplon (born 1951, in Schenectady, New York) is an American journalist and author.
Written Work
After eight years as a daily newspaper reporter, culminating in a stint at the Kansas City Times, he went on to co-write (or "ghost") 11 autobiographies. These include works with Cher and Bill Parcells, along with three New York Times best-sellers: Return with Honor (with Captain Scott O'Grady, 1995); My Story (with Sarah, Duchess of York, 1996); and My Father's Daughter (with Tina Sinatra, 2000). He also co-wrote, with Betty Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child (1992), the sequel to Not Without My Daughter.
Coplon's solo work includes a non-fictional treatment of rodeo bull riding (Gold Buckle, HarperCollins West, 1995) and magazine pieces for New York (magazine) (where he is a contributing editor), The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and Playboy. While his topics vary broadly, he has written frequently about NBA basketball, and his work has twice been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing (1991 and 1997). His New York profile of the late Gerald Boyd, the highest-ranking black editor in the history of the New York Times, won a 2008 Mirror Award from the Newhouse School.
In a controversial 1988 article in The Village Voice, Coplon criticized scholarship surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. In the article, according to Cathy Young, Coplon "dismissed as absurd the idea that the famine had been created by the Communist regime". In a letter to the editors, Robert Conquest dismissed the article by Coplon as "error and absurdity".