The Penguin Speakers Bureau

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 covering the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. 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 whom Lyden has since come to know well. Both Harvard and Yale are teaching the documentary, Harvard at its Carr Center for Human Rights. Lyden is also working on a new book, VOX BABYLONIA, due to be published in 2009 by Houghton Mifflin. A memoir of her time in Iraq, it will cover four years of journeys there and focus intimately on the Iraqi civilians whose lives interacted with hers.

Lyden’s previous book, DAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, was nationally acclaimed by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, who wrote that it “belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside THE LIAR’S CLUB and ANGELA’S ASHES.” DAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA is available in eleven foreign editions and has long been in film development.

Lyden joined NPR in 1979, becoming one of NPR’s first correspondents outside Washington and joining NPR’s Scott Simon in the 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.” The NPR Chicago bureau included some of the most legendary voices ever to contribute to NPR, from Lyden and Simon to John Hockenberry and Ira Glass. NPR’s Ina Jaffe, now in Los Angeles, is another alum.

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, from where she covered the Gulf War, 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. In 1995, Jacki did a groundbreaking series for NPR on Iran.

As a host, she 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 NPR’s George Foster Peabody Award and Alfred I. duPont–Columbia 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 the radio documentary, 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 among Palestinians and Jews in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. Also in 2002, Lyden hosted the National Story Project on the Weekend Edition of 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 participated in the university’s program of study at Cambridge University in 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 downtime between Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. She is married to Washington Post senior photographer William (Bill) O’Leary.