About Debra ollivier
Debra is the author of the national bestseller What French Women Know (Penguin) and Entre Nous (St. Martin's Press). Her work is featured in the bestselling anthologies Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood (Villard) and Because I Said So: 36 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves (Harper Perennial), as well as in Harper's Magazine, Playboy, The New York Times, Parents Magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, Le Monde and other media. She has been instrumental in ghostwriting, book doctoring, and editing over twenty titles, working collaboratively with authors on a broad and eclectic mix of subjects. Her editorial chops were further honed as an Acquisitions Editor for Parallax Press (an independent publisher founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh), a Contributing Editor for Salon Magazine, and a Managing Editor for The Huffington Post.
Over the years Debra has also had the good fortune of assisting in making several big ideas happen, including the launch of the first TED conference with Richard Wurman and the Social Venture Network. She was raised in Los Angeles by New Yorkers who headed west to seek their bliss and stopped in California when there was no more west left. Both parents were big in the human potential movement and happily partook in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. (Debra longed for a vanilla family but grew up with a Ben & Jerry's experiment.) She graduated from UCLA with a degree in French literature and worked as a freelance writer in France, where she became a dual citizen, had two kids, and wrote about French culture and the glorious vexations of parenting.
She offers a range of editorial services and currently lives in Los Angeles.
