Anderson Cooper
Anderson Cooper
In 2001, Cooper joined CNN, where he was given his own show, Anderson Cooper 360°; he has remained the show's host since. He developed a reputation for his on-the-ground reporting of breaking news events, with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina causing his popularity to sharply increase. For his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Cooper received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honor granted by the Haitian government. From September 2011 to May 2013, he also served as the host of his own syndicated television daytime talk show, Anderson Live.
Anderson Cooper
Cooper has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, as well as an Edward Murrow Award) from the Overseas Press Club in 2011. A member of the Vanderbilt family, he came out as gay in 2012, becoming "the most prominent gay journalist on American television". In 2016, Cooper became the first LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate, and he has received several GLAAD Media Awards.
Early life and education
Cooper was born in Manhattan, New York City, the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist Gloria Vanderbilt. His maternal grandparents were millionaire equestrian Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family and socialite Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and Reginald's patrilineal great-grandfather was business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the prominent Vanderbilt shipping and railroad fortune. He has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus "Stan" Stokowski (b. 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (b. 1952), from Gloria's ten-year marriage to conductor Leopold Stokowski. In 2014, Cooper appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots, where he learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States.
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