Anderson Cooper signs two-book deal with Harper

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper has signed a two-book deal with publisher Harper, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

Cooper, the host of the CNN program “Anderson Cooper 360°,” will collaborate on the books with Katherine Howe, an author best known for her Salem witch trials-themed novels “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane” and the forthcoming “The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs.”

The first of Cooper’s two books is slated for publication in 2022, Harper said. The publisher did not indicate what Cooper’s books would be about, although Fortune magazine reports they will be works of nonfiction.

Cooper, known for his on-location reporting from the sites of natural disasters and political unrest, has worked for CNN since 2001. Before he started at the cable news network, he reported for ABC and for Channel One, a news agency that produced programming for students in grade schools and high schools.

He is one of television journalism’s most decorated correspondents, having won five Emmy Awards and two GLAAD Media Awards. Cooper is the son of fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt and the late writer and actor Wyatt Emory Cooper.

Cooper has gained a reputation as a hard-hitting interviewer occasionally given to on-air displays of emotion. In 2016, while reporting on the victims of the massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., he broke down while reading the names of those killed in the shooting.

Cooper is the author of two previous books. His first, “Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival” was published in 2006, with his collaboration with Vanderbilt, “The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss,” following 10 years later.

The latter book, which took the form of a series of email exchanges between Cooper and Vanderbilt, dealt with the death of Wyatt Emory Cooper and with Anderson Cooper’s decision to come out as gay in 2012. Both books were bestsellers.