Gay Courter

In February 2020, Courter was one of 3,700 passengers and crew quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was held in port at Yokohama, Japan during the coronavirus outbreak. In an interview with The New York Times, Courter questioned the efficacy of keeping passengers quarantined on board the ship, where the virus was rapidly spreading. The Atlantic published a piece by Courter, detailing her trip in Asia, her time on the Diamond Princess, and her experience in quarantine once back in the United States. Courter feared she and her husband would suffer from symptoms of PTSD, and those experiences later became the book, Quarantine! How I Survived the Diamond Princess Cornonavirus Crisis.

Their PBS productions include Freedom From Famine: The Norman Borlaug Story (Mathile/PBS 2009), Solutions Micro.doc series (WEDU/PBS, 1998), Where’s My Chance? The Case for America’s Children (WEDU/PBS, 1994), and The Florida Water Story (WEDU/PBS, 1988).

Courter currently lives in Crystal River, Florida with her husband.  They are the parents of Blake Courter, an engineer; Joshua Courter, a filmmaker and furniture designer; and Ashley Rhodes-Courter, MSW, a motivational speaker, social worker, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Three Little Words (Simon & Schuster, 2008) and Three More Words (Simon & Schuster 2015).

In 1995, Courter received special recognition from the Florida Chapter of American Women in Radio and Television, Inc. for her work on Where's My Chance? The Case for Our Children, which also won an Emmy award. Courter received her second Emmy from the National Academy of Arts and Television Sciences, Suncoast Chapter, for a series of public service announcements called Solutions for America’s Children.

Gay Courter is an American author, filmmaker, and children's rights activist. Her first non-fiction work, The Beansprout Book (1973), introduced beansprouts to the supermarkets of America, and she eventually became known as "The Pied Piper of sprouting." Five of her books have been on the New York Times Bestseller list, including her first novel, The Midwife (1981), that was also included on a list of Longest Best Selling Books in 1982. Her works have been translated into several languages, including French, Spanish, and Swedish. Courter is credited with being one of the first Women Authors to write a published novel on a word processor.

From 1967 to 1970, she worked in the documentary and educational film business in New York with Harvest Productions, ACI Films, and Concord Productions and in 1972 co-founded Courter Films and Associates with husband Philip Courter producing more than 200 documentary, educational, and corporate films.

Courter attended schools in Taiwan, Japan and the United States, and was homeschooled by her mother during their travels. She graduated from AB Davis High School and received a B.A. in Drama/Film from Antioch College in 1966.

Courter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Leonard M. Weisman, an international businessman, and Elsie Spector Weisman, a social worker who studied at Carnegie Tech. She is the elder of two daughters. Her sister, Robin Madden, M.D., is a pediatrician. Her foster sister, Jennifer Chang Su, began living with the family while they were in Taiwan in 1952.