NSC 2008

Jacki Lyden

Longtime listeners recognize Jacki Lyden’s voice from her frequent work as an NPR substitute program host and senior correspondent. She has served as an alternate host for NPR’s news programs since 1986, including All Things Considered in both its daily and weekend broadcasts, where she is currently featured monthly as a substitute host.

Since October 2003, Lyden has traveled regularly to Iraq, where she first worked for NPR in 1990 and 1991, covering the first Gulf War. Her pieces for NPR include the 2006 documentary, Anatomy of a Shooting, with NPR’s John McChesney. The investigative piece which aired on June 23, 2006, recounts the death of Lyden’s own translator at the hands of an American soldier, who Lyden has since come to know well. Both Harvard and Yale are teaching the documentary. Lyden is also working on a new book, Vox Babylonia, due out in 2009 from Houghton Mifflin. A memoir of Iraq, it covers four years of journeys across the war there and focuses intimately on Iraqi civilians whose lives interact with hers.

Lyden’s previous book, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (Houghton Mifflin, 1997) is out in eleven foreign editions and considered a memoir classic by The New York Times.

Lyden joined NPR in 1979, becoming one of NPR’s first correspondents outside Washington and joining NPR’s Scott Simon in then newly-opened Chicago bureau. This, she says, was absolutely the place she was meant to work — she knew it when she heard Scott questioning unemployed steelworkers, asking if they could be paid the same, would they be content to make ‘pink plastic flamingoes.’

In 1989 she became NPR’s London correspondent, where her coverage included a number of stories on the IRA in Northern Ireland. In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Lyden went immediately to Amman, Jordan, where she covered the Gulf War from there and Baghdad and many other Middle Eastern countries. Her work supported NPR’s 1991 win of an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for Gulf War Coverage. Since that time, she has reported from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, and other countries, and in 1995 did a groundbreaking series for NPR on Iran. As a host, she has marched across Ireland playing Queen Maeve, and in 2007, brought the theater couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine back to life in a story on their home, ‘Ten Chimneys.’ Lyden was at home in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, and was NPR’s first reporter on the air from New York that day. She stayed on the story from Ground Zero. She shared in the networks NPR’s George Foster Peabody Award and Alfred I. duPont-Colulmbia University Award for coverage of 9/11.

By December 2001, Lyden had arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan to cover the nascent government and reawakening culture. She returned there in 2004 to teach radio documentaries: “My Life is Afghanistan,” for Internews. In 2002, she received the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and Television for best foreign documentary, together with producer Davar Ardalan, for “Loss and Its Aftermath,” about bereavement amongst Palestinians and Jews in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.

Also in 2002, Lyden host the “National Story Project” on Weekend All Things Considered with internationally-acclaimed novelist Paul Auster. Over 4,000 listeners submitted their stories to Auster, who edited them. The book that emerged from the show, I Thought My Father Was God, became a national bestseller.

Lyden is a graduate of Valparaiso University and its Christ College scholars program. She has also done the university’s program of study in Cambridge University, England. She was also a Benton Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1991-92.

She is a popular featured speaker. She has written for Granta, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others.

Lyden divides her down time between Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. She is married to Washington Post senior photographer William (Bill) O’Leary.