Jacki Lyden
Substitute Program Host
Longtime listeners recognize Jacki Lyden's voice from her frequent work as a substitute program host on NPR, where she can currently be heard on the weekend broadcasts of All Things Considered.
Lyden joined NPR in 1979, becoming one of its first correspondents stationed outside Washington and joining Scott Simon in the then newly-opened Chicago bureau. In 1989, Lyden 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, 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.
Her pieces for NPR included the 2006 documentary, Anatomy of a Shooting. 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.
As a host, Lyden 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 organization'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. 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 hosted 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 at Cambridge University, and was a Benton Fellow at the University of Chicago from 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.
