Erin Bried
Erin Bried is an American publisher, author, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Kazoo magazine, the first children’s magazine to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, in 2019. She is the author of three books, including How to Sew a Button: and other Nifty Things Your Grandmother Knew.
Early life and education
Bried was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to William Bried, a lawyer, and Claire Bried, a teacher. She attended Parkland High School in South Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania where she was captain of the soccer team in her senior year and was nominated for the first "Soccer Scholar Athlete Award" from the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference in 1992.Bried then attended Pennsylvania State University’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, where she graduated with a degree in advertising in 1996.
Career
Between 1997 and 2015 Bried worked at Condé Nast as an editor at Glamour and then editor-at-large at Self. She was also a writer and editor for Golf for Women, Women’s Health and Good Housekeeping.Bried decided to create Kazoo magazine in 2016 in response to a shopping trip with her 5-year old daughter, where the covers of the girls’ magazines they looked at “all had dolls, lip gloss and princesses on them; they all had articles about ‘how to get pretty hair, how to have good manners’". In creating a print-only magazine, Bried saw the “magazine as an opportunity to politicize girls at a critical moment in their lives, to ‘shore up their foundation’ of empowerment before the pressures of patriarchy set in during adolescence.”
Bried is the only full-time staff member of the magazine, she writes everything except the fiction. On behalf of Kazoo she has appeared on Today, Better TV and NPR.