Jacki Lyden is an American author of the memoir, "Daughter of the Queen of Sheba," 1999, which the New York Times hailed as a "memoir classic," about growing up with her mentally ill mother. She leads writing workshops in Ireland and the US, and is also a speaker, interviewer and award-winning journalist. She was a correspondent and host for NPR from 1979 to 2014, and still contributes there occasionally. After 2014, she hosted "The Seams," a podcast and NPR series about fashion as anthropology. These are archived at www.theseams.org and JackiLyden.com. In 2017-2018, she was a Rosalynn Carter fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center in Atlanta, GA. She is currently writing her second memoir, "Tell Me Something Good." She is represented by the Brandt & Hochman Literary Agency, NY.
In 1979, Lyden joined NPR as a freelance reporter in the Chicago bureau. By 1989, Lyden was stationed in London, covering The Troubles in Northern Ireland. She covered the Gulf War from the Middle East. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she continued to serve as a foreign correspondent for NPR. Lyden, then living in Brooklyn, was NPR's first correspondent on the air from New York during the September 11 attacks and reported from "Ground Zero". In late 2001, she served as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan. As a regular substitute host for Weekend All Things Considered and other shows, like Weekend Edition, she interviewed numerous poets, authors, filmmakers. She and the late John McChesney produced "Anatomy of a Shooting" in 2006, about the accidental killing of her Iraqi translator, Yasser Salihee, by an American soldier. After 2014, when she left NPR, she hosted an NPR series and podcast on fashion as anthropology and history and fair trade called The Seams. Lyden explained that The Seams aims to "give voice and legitimacy and intellectual inquiry " to getting dressed. The Seams motto was "clothing is our common thread, in every stitch, a story." Her reporting has earned her wide acclaim, including two Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award awards, a Peabody Award, and a Gracie Award. She is a popular speaker represented by The Tuesday Agency and in 2019 appeared at 92Y, Politics and Prose, the Center for Fiction, and the Skyland Trail. Together with poet and memoirist Nick Flynn she was the keynote speaker for Hippocamp 2019, a conference for nonfiction writers annually which brings writers from around the country through Hippocampus Magazine. She is a member of the Authors Guild. In 2017, she has established the "Love Comes in at the Eye" writing workshop in Connemara, Ireland. Each year, ten established writers are selected to come to Renvyle House Hotel for "Love Comes in at the Eye." The workshop has one fellowship sponsored by the Alan Cheuse Center for International Writers at George Mason University. Lyden has also established workshops for women writers in the US, and together with her former colleague, the New York Times best-selling author Eric Weiner, established the Colton House Writers Workshop in Flagstaff, Arizona, which meets in late October, 2020
Personal life
Lyden is married to Bill O'Leary, a senior photographer for the Washington Post. In 1999, Lyden published a memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, about growing up with a mentally ill mother. The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani review described it as " a book that creates one of the most indelible portraits of a mother-daughter relationship to come along in years, a book that belongs on the shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars' Club by Mary Karr and Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Lyden is currently working on her second memoir, called "Tell Me Something Good," which she calls a memoir of transformation, from her long NPR career to a writing life. She divides her time between the Washington DC area Brooklyn, and Delafield, Wisconsin.
