michaelcogdill

I'm blessed as one of the most honored television storytellers in America. The cache of awards really is an embarrassment of riches, including 30 Emmys and the National Edward R. Murrow for a broad range of achievement, from live reporting to long-form storytelling. So, you knew me in high school and you're surprised? No more than I am. College woke me to sun-sized opportunity of my times, and I'm still a one-man party of gratitude for that. Yes, I work in television, but we can be friends anyway. My TV credits include CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and The Today Show. My interview credits are about as varied as you can get: President Barack Obama, The Reverend Billy Graham, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Abby Hoffman, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator John McCain, Howard K. Smith, James Brown, and countless eminent members of Congress along with other key news makers around the country. Coverage credits? They've been fun, and include Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States and major figures in entertainment. I'm a speaker who works hard to inspire the hearts and minds of the room. I dig talking about the extraordinary heroism of seemingly ordinary people I've covered in more than twenty years in television. Storytelling on stage can leave an audiences with the power to destroy fear, despair, and the meanness that makes news. That's why it's a passion of mine. I'm equally passionate about relationships, for they make up our lives and the legacies that outlast us. Intimacy leadership and love as a leadership platform are aspirations of mine. Help me keep reaching for that!! That reach, by the way, includes writing, working across genres that include children’s literature, the Southern novel, and self-improvement non-fiction. My latest completed work, a novel entitled She-Rain, launched in 2010, with a film now in the works. Another Southern Novel set along the North Carolina coast during the Vietnam War era is on my creative radar, as time allows. It's a good and full life. I was born a poor and ugly child of the comely American South. Okay, that's only true in part. I met this world in Asheville, North Carolina, June 11, 1961 -- the son of a truck driver and a mill worker. I'm extremely proud of my working-people roots, drawing on their deep-plowed wisdom in my reporting, writing and public speaking. I'm blessed to call myself a cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Asheville with a degree in communications, emphasis on the liberal arts. Even more blessed is this fact: I married Jill Kremer Cogdill in 1985, and together we've founded a company, Cracker the Crab LLC, publishing children's literature and offering a product line with emphasis on raising self-esteem in the young. I currently anchor the 6:00 and 11:00 news for WYFF4 television in the Western Carolinas and Northeast Georgia! If you're this way, give a shout. On second thought, give a shout no matter which way you're headed.