Kevin Bleyer is a writer, mainly.

A television writer, book writer, speechwriter, ghostwriter, aspiring playwriter, occasional constitution rewriter, and sometime wrong-righter, most recently Kevin was the head writer for the reboot of Doha Debates, starring comedian Mo Amer.

A veteran of late night, for the better part of a decade Kevin was a writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he won four Primetime Emmy awards, a Writers Guild Award, and a Peabody Award — and while he was there, the show became the most consecutive Emmy-winning program in television history.  While we was there, not necessarily because he was there.

He spent the previous decade as a writer/producer for Dennis Miller and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

In scripted episodic television, Kevin was a writer for Disney+’s The Right Stuff — an adaptation of the Tom Wolfe book — FOX's Sleepy Hollow, and Bravo's Significant Others, and somewhere in there he has created and executive produced scripted pilots for Disney Television Animation, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and Showtime.

Honestly, it’s all a blur.

He has taken his satirical urge global, having  produced television direct from hotspots as far-flung as Bishkek, Basra, Skopje, and Des Moines.  In 2013, Kevin lived for a time in Kyrgyzstan, where he executive produced Studio 7, the first political satire news show in all of Central Asia.  Upon returning, he co-founded Pilot Media Initiatives, which launches civics-minded media programs in democratically-challenged countries, nearby and far-flung.  As such, over the past decade he has produced and helped launch scripted, unscripted, and political satire television shows in Macedonia, Nigeria, Moldova, Kenya, Jordan, Estonia, Moldova again, Jordan again, Moldova a few more times, and the hinterlands of Miami.  One of those programs, Yesterday’s News, received the prestigious Zlatna Bubamara Award (aka “the Golden Ladybug”) for the best satirical show in Macedonia.  And for that, he’d like to thank the Golden Ladybug Academy.  Another earned Kenyan host Ty Ngachira “Best Performance in a TV Comedy” at the 2023 Kalasha Awards, which true television fans know better as the unofficial Emmys of Kenya.

Stateside, Kevin has served as a writer and producer for NBC News’ Today Show, as a Supervising Producer for MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow Daily, and as a writer and producer for a CNN talk show pilot starring Kal Penn.

You want books? Kevin is the bestselling author of Me the People: One Man’s Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America (Random House) and a co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Earth: The Book. 

More recently, he is the co-author, with former US Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson, of the book How to Sweet-Talk a Shark — recounting among other adventures their humanitarian mission to North Korea to negotiate the release of hostage Kenneth Bae.  Pre-Rodman.

For the unabridged audiobook of Me the People, which Kevin voiced all by his abridged self, he was a finalist for an Audie Award — which, he learned, is apparently the Academy Awards for Audiobooks.  Had he actually won, the trophy would have gone up on the mantel, right next to the many trophies he most certainly didn't win for being a recurring voice for the Onion Radio News.

Kevin’s weekly column in The Daily Beast was much shorter than a book.  As were the columns he wrote for Foreign Policy during and about the FIFA World Cup.  And with only a few hours notice, he traveled to Guyana to write much less than a book for Afar Magazine's popular, improvisational Spin the Globe series.  And not just any issue of Afar Magazine, mind you, the precise issue that won a National Magazine Award.  Coincidence?  Probably! 

As a speechwriter, Kevin contributed to many of the (funnier) speeches of President Barack Obama, including all of the president’s addresses to the annual White House Correspondents Dinners. He has also written speeches for NASA astronauts, sitting senators, foreign diplomats, US Ambassadors, and at least one Shakira.  And Kevin — true story — even served for a time as the Deputy Chief Speechwriter for the Mayor of New York.  Not that one.  The other one.

Then he got depressed.  Someday you’ll be able to read about that in his book The Greatest Depression, which he hopes to finish someday.

In 2014, Kevin was a resident Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, on the invitation of former Obama senior advisor and IOP director David Axelrod.  In 2018, Kevin was an adjunct professor in the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

A graduate of Stanford University, Kevin began his career as a dramaturg and assistant to actress/playwright Anna Deavere Smith at the New York Public Theater and Broadway’s Cort Theater.  He then moved to London, where he worked for journalist David Brancaccio at London Bureau of Public Radio International's business affairs program Marketplace. Today his own commentary can occasionally be heard on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, or some podcast somewhere, or as a guest on CNN and MSNBC.

Kevin’s one and only TedTalk is ostensibly about the challenge of telling jokes about despotic regimes, but is really about how to tell jokes about giving TedTalks.

One last thing. In 2008, Kevin became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Truman National Security Fellow, so he secretly runs the government.

He probably shouldn’t have told you that.

Signed,

Kevin Bleyer
Founder and Executive Senior Vice President,
Bleyer Worldwide