Researching Erin Kaplan

Erin Kaplan graduated from Marymount Manhattan College with an undergraduate degree in marketing. For five and a half years, Kaplan worked for ELLE Magazine and was their youngest Director of Public Relations. During that time, she was also a cast member on MTV's reality television show The City.

In January 2011, Kaplan left ELLE to join Teen Vogue as their new Senior Director of Public Relations, taking over from Eleanor Banco.

Kaplan is currently the Executive Director of Public Relations for Architectural Digest. Previous to this, she was also the Director of Public Relations for Allure Magazine.

Kaplan is also a regular columnist for make/shift, a quarterly feminist magazine that launched in 2007 and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

Kaplan’s essays have been anthologized in several books, including (as Erin Aubry) "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" (Villard, Washington Square Press),"Step Into A World" (Wiley & Sons) and "Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood" (Doubleday).The last book’s contributors include Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Walker, and won an American Book Award in 2005. She won the PEN USA 2001 award for journalism.

Kaplan has published two books. Her first book was a collection of essays and reportage titled Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispaches From a Black Journalista, and was published in 2011. Her second, I Heart Obama, an extended essay about the cultural and personal meaning of the first black American president, was published in 2016.

Kaplan was born and raised in Los Angeles, though her family is originally from New Orleans. She was married to Alan Kaplan, a Los Angeles high school history teacher, for 15 years. He died in 2015.Kaplan holds an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and teaches creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles.