Michelle Ferguson-Cohen | |
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| Born | Ft. Benning, United States |
| Occupation | author, illustrator, publisher |
| Genre | Children's books |
| Notable works | Daddy, You're My Hero! |
| Website | |
| www | |
Michelle Ferguson-Cohen is a children's book author, illustrator, and publisher. Her father is a career military officer and Vietnam veteran. As a military brat herself, many of the picture books she develops are written for and feature military brats.
Ferguson-Cohen wrote, illustrated, and published the first commercially available children's books for military brats [1] and the first children's picture books for children coping with deployment. [2] [3] She has been called the "Dr. Seuss for Military Brats" in a Washington Times article that was laudatory in tone about her books' ability to help children understand about their parent's military deployments. [4]
Ferguson-Cohen established Little Redhaired Girl Publishing to publish her books as part of a series she entitled Books for Brats to encourage pride in the term "Military Brat" outside the military community. Ferguson-Cohen's goal was to create material that would appeal to all children and introduce their military family neighbors. Though self-published, her titles "Daddy, You're My Hero!" and "Mommy, You're My Hero!" have reportedly reached hundreds of thousands of youthful readers [5] through both targeted and broad based marketing. They were first published in 2001 and are now in their 3rd edition. [1] The books have also been used in the classrooms as material to promote tolerance and understanding amongst peers, and distributed to both commercial and civilian outlets. [6]
Books for Brats were early to recognize and service the "suddenly military" families of the National Guard and Reserves. [7] During the first deployments of the Iraq War, Ferguson-Cohen worked with Family Readiness Groups nationwide to host readings. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] She was able to obtain recommendations by many educational, medical, and child development experts [13] suggesting that her books could be utilized to explain deployment and convey coping skills to children facing separation from a parent. [14] [15] [16] They are also suggested as resources for their unique content, multicultural illustrations, and representations of female soldiers. [17]
Sought out by the press as an expert in the military community, [18] [19] [20] [21] she became an advocate for military brats promoting equal representation for the military community in the media.
Prior to her career as children's author and advocate for military brats, Ferguson-Cohen was a music industry entrepreneur [22] [23] who owned an agency based in New York and London. She represented international DJs including Richie Hawtin, [24] Laurent Garnier, Sven Vath and rock musicians including The Charlatans, Gene and Pet Shop Boys.
During her career in the entertainment industry she was involved celebrity charity events to raise funds for UK-based NGO War Child. [25] A writer and humorist, she is listed as a contributor to the Complete Idiot's Guide to Jokes. [26]
Lois Ann Lowry is an American writer. She is the author of several books for children and young adults, including The Giver Quartet, Number the Stars, and Rabble Starkey. She is known for writing about difficult subject matters, dystopias, and complex themes in works for young audiences.
Jessica Dawn Lynch is an American teacher, actress, and former United States Army soldier who served in the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a private first class.
Lori Ann Piestewa was a United States Army soldier killed during the Iraq War. A member of the Quartermaster Corps, she died in the same Iraqi attack in which fellow soldiers Shoshana Johnson and Piestewa's friend Jessica Lynch were injured. A Hopi, Piestewa was the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. military and the first woman in the U.S. military killed in the Iraq War. Arizona's Piestewa Peak is named in her honor.
Heather Has Two Mommies is a children's book written by Lesléa Newman with illustrations by Diana Souza. First published in 1989, it was one of the first pieces of LGBTQ+ children's literature to garner broad attention.
In the United States, a military brat is the child of a parent(s), adopted parent(s) or legal guardian(s) serving full-time in the United States Armed Forces, whether current or former. The term military brat can also refer to the subculture and lifestyle of such families.
Heather Brooke Armstrong was an American blogger and internet personality from Salt Lake City, Utah, who wrote under the pseudonym Dooce. She was best known for her website dooce.com, which peaked at nearly 8.5 million monthly readers in 2004 before declining due to various factors including the rise of social media; she had actively blogged from c. 2001 until her death by suicide in 2023.
Cindy Lee Sheehan is an American anti-war activist, whose son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by enemy action during the Iraq War. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended antiwar protest at a makeshift camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch—a stand that drew both passionate support and criticism. Sheehan ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008. She was a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's foreign policy. Her memoir, Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism, was published in 2006. In an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017, Sheehan continued to hold her critical views towards George W. Bush, while also criticizing the militarism of Donald Trump.
Camp followers are civilians who follow armies. There are two common types of camp followers; first, the spouses and children of soldiers, who follow their spouse or parent's army from place to place; the second type of camp followers have historically been informal army service providers, servicing the needs of encamped soldiers, in particular selling goods or services that the military does not supply—these have included cooking, laundering, liquor, nursing, sexual services and sutlery.
Daniel Edward Cohen was an American non-fiction author who wrote over one hundred books on a variety of subjects, mainly for young audiences. He also fought for justice for the death of his daughter and the other 269 victims of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Laura Joffe Numeroff is an American author and illustrator of children's books who is best known as the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
Mary Edwards Wertsch is an author, journalist, independent publisher, and expert on the subculture of American military brats. She wrote the book Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. This book is considered the seminal piece of literature dealing with the effects of growing up as a military brat. In writing the book, Wertsch, a reporter by training, interviewed over 80 military brats and documented the patterns she found in the ways military children are raised, and the ways they continue to be affected, both positively and negatively, well into adulthood.
A military brat is a child of serving or retired military personnel. Military brats are associated with a unique subculture and cultural identity. A military brat's childhood or adolescent life may be immersed in military culture to the point where the mainstream culture of their home country may seem foreign or peripheral. In many countries where there are military brat subcultures, the child's family moves great distances from one non-combat assignment to another for much of their youth.
Sarah Bird is an American novelist, screenwriter, and journalist.
Military sociology is a subfield within sociology. It corresponds closely to C. Wright Mills's summons to connect the individual world to broader social structures. Military sociology aims toward the systematic study of the military as a social group rather than as a military organization. This highly specialized sub-discipline examines issues related to service personnel as a distinct group with coerced collective action based on shared interests linked to survival in vocation and combat, with purposes and values that are more defined and narrow than within civil society. Military sociology also concerns civil-military relations and interactions between other groups or governmental agencies.
A Flat Daddy is a life-sized cardboard cut-out of someone absent from home, the idea being to keep connected to family members during a deployment. Flat Daddies came in fashion after the start of the Iraq War when spouses and children were left alone after soldiers were called up for duty. By the mid-2000s (decade), thousands of Flat Daddies have been produced for families in the USA.
Donna Lynn Musil is an American documentary filmmaker, writer, and activist exploring the subculture of U.S. military brats. She wrote and directed the 2006 documentary Brats: Our Journey Home, a film about growing up the child of a military family and the effect it has on that child's adult life. She is also the founder of Brats Without Borders, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing awareness, celebration, and support for military brats and other third culture children.
Yaya and Angelina: The Spoiled Brat Movie is a 2009 Filipino comedy film directed by Michael Tuviera. The film stars Michael V. and Ogie Alcasid in their respective title roles. The film is a theatrical spinoff of Bubble Gang's sketch "Ang Spoiled".
Third culture kids (TCK) or third culture individuals (TCI) are people who were raised in a culture other than their parents' or the culture of their country of nationality, and also live in a different environment during a significant part of their child development years. They typically are exposed to a greater volume and variety of cultural influences than those who grow up in one particular cultural setting. The term applies to both adults and children, as the term kid refers to the individual's formative or developmental years. However, for clarification, sometimes the term adult third culture kid (ATCK) is used.
Sophia Grace Brownlee and her cousin Rosie McClelland, both from Harlow, Essex, England, make up Sophia Grace & Rosie, a duo of singers, child actresses and internet personalities. They gained popularity by making regular appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, after posting a cover version of the Nicki Minaj song "Super Bass" that became popular on YouTube. The video was posted to YouTube in September 2011 and has gained more than 55 million views as of May 2022.
Lalita Iyer is an Indian author, journalist, and columnist based in Mumbai, India. She has written several books, including I'm Pregnant, Not Terminally Ill, You Idiot!, The Whole Shebang: Sticky Bits of Being a Woman, and Sridevi: Queen of Hearts. She has also written children's literature and is the author of the blogs Chickwit and Mommygolightly.
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