Jacki Lyden
Longtime listeners recognize Jacki Lyden's voice from her frequent work as a substitute host on NPR. As a journalist who has been with NPR since 1979, Lyden regards herself first and foremost as a storyteller and looks for the distinctive human voice in a huge range of national and international stories.
In the last five years, Lyden has reported from diverse locations including Paris, New York, the backstreets of Baghdad, the byways around rural Kentucky and spent time among former prostitutes in Nashville.
Most recently, Lyden focused her reporting on the underground, literally. In partnership with National Geographic, she and photographer Stephen Alvarez explored the catacombs and underground of the City of Light. The report of the expedition aired on Weekend Edition Sunday and was the cover story of the February 2011 National Geographic magazine.
Lyden's book, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, recounts her own experience growing up under the spell of a colorful mother suffering from manic depression. The memoir has been published in 11 foreign editions and is considered a memoir classic by The New York Times. Daughter of the Queen of Sheba has been in process as a film, based upon a script by the A-list writer, Karen Croner. She is working on a sequel to the book which will be about memory and what one can really hold on to in a tumultuous life.
Along with Scott Simon, current host of Weekend Edition Saturday, and producer Jonathan Baer, Lyden helped to pioneer NPR's Chicago bureau in 1979. Ten years later, Lyden became NPR's London correspondent and reported on the IRA in Northern Ireland.
In the summer of 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Lyden went to Amman, Jordan, where she covered the Gulf War often traveling to and reporting from Baghdad and many other Middle Eastern cites. Her work supported NPR's 1991 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for Gulf War coverage. Additionally, Lyden has reported from countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. In 1995, she did a groundbreaking series for NPR on Iran on the emerging civil society and dissent, called "Iran at the Crossroads."
At home in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, Lyden was NPR's first reporter on the air from New York that day. She shared in NPR's George Foster Peabody Award and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Lyden later covered the aftermath of the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In 2002, Lyden and producer Davar Ardalan received the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and Television for best foreign documentary for "Loss and Its Aftermath." The film was about bereavement among Palestinians and Jews in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.
That same year Lyden hosted the "National Story Project" on Weekend All Things Considered with internationally-acclaimed novelist Paul Auster. The book that emerged from the show, I Thought My Father Was God, became a national bestseller.
Over the years, Lyden's articles have been publications such as Granta, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a popular speaker, especially on mental health.
A graduate of Valparaiso University, Lyden was given an honorary Ph.D. from the school in 2010. She participated in Valparaiso's program of study at Cambridge University and was a 1991-92 Benton Fellow in Middle East studies at the University of Chicago.
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Even as Ireland benefits from a booming high-tech economy, many are taking time to keep the past alive. The rural tradition of "rambling houses," where people gather for entertainment and fellowship, has been revived in County Kerry and elsewhere.
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William James was an intellectual force of nature in 19th century America. Trained as a medical doctor, he saw links between the life sciences, psychology and philosophy, and was a seminal thinker on religion. Author Robert D. Richardson has written a new biography called William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.
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Work aprons, party aprons, Depression-era aprons. They're all part of The Apron Chronicles, a traveling exhibit managed by the Women's Museum in Dallas.
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The premise for each story in Robert Olen Butler's new book is disturbing. Severance recalls the last thoughts of those who have been decapitated. St. George, Marie-Antoinette, Medusa, Anne Boyeln Sir Walter Raleigh, the Lady of the Lake ... In Butler's imagining, their last words are poetic and brief, and reveal what is most precious about being alive.
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For centuries, an evening of dinner and the opera has been a popular combination. Food historian Francine Segan celebrates this combination with a new book of recipes inspired by beloved arias, overtures and composers.
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Esther Schor, poet and professor of English at Princeton University, has written a biography of Emma Lazarus, whose verse graces the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus' life and work are worth a second look in light of the current debate on U.S. immigration policy. -
Cross an artichoke with celery, and you come close to getting a cardoon. For our food moment this week, food writer Peggy Knickerbocker talks about cardoons — a wonderfully weird vegetable with mediterranean "roots." Knickerbocker is the co-author of The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market Cookbook. -
Poet Billy Collins says the central theme of poetry is death. He manages to ruminate on this in a manner both whimsical and poignant in his latest collection, The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems.
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From lovesick personals to "help wanted" notices with some peculiar requirements: a look at the history of classified ads in the United States. Author Sara Bader shares some of the funny, heartrending and just plain baffling advertisements featured in her book, Strange Red Cow and Other Curious Classified Ads from the Past.
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Jacki Lyden talks with biographer Lyndall Gordon about the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Gordon describes Wollstonecraft's violent upbringing, her radical views on education, and her failed love affair. -
Richard McCann's autobiographical novel Mother of Sorrows took 20 years to complete. The author tells Jacki Lyden how the book came to be.
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Eight years ago, Shannon Applegate inherited a five-acre cemetery dating back to the pioneer era in western Oregon. The experience has led the historian and writer to pen a book, Living Among Headstones.
