Legendary Journalist Ray Suarez to Release New Book This Spring
07 Mar 2024
Veteran Journalist, Author, Broadcaster and APB speaker Ray Suarez will release his latest book next month. We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century—an Oral History will be available on April 23.
To write the book, Suarez crisscrossed the country to speak to new Americans from all corners of the globe and record their stories. This portrait of our newest citizens is full of their own, compelling voices. It’s a story as old as the country, yet each new wave of arrivals tells that classic story in new and crucially important ways.
Suarez also currently hosts On Shifting Ground, a radio program syndicated on NPR and PRX stations across the U.S. The show explores international fault lines and how they impact us all, and features conversations with journalists, leaders and policy experts to help us read between the headlines—and give us hope for human resilience.
In addition, Ray launched Brooklyn Boy Productions in 2019, where he creates content for public radio and television, The Washington Post, The Independent (London), The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pew Research, Wisconsin Public Radio, Knowable, “America in One Room,” Hispanics in Philanthropy, Slate, palabra, The Nation, Hearst TV, AlterNet, CityPaper, The American Communities Project, The Intercept, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and National Catholic Reporter, among others.
In 2022, Suarez was a visiting professor at NYU Shanghai, teaching and lecturing an international student body in the Political Science Department. In 2018, he was appointed the John J. McCloy Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. From 2013-2016, he was the host of Al Jazeera America’s (AJAM) daily news program, Inside Story. Before going to AJAM, Suarez spent 14 years as a correspondent and anchor at public television’s nightly newscast, The PBS NewsHour, where he rose to become chief national correspondent.
Suarez came to The NewsHour after six-and-a-half years as the Washington-based host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation. During his time as host, the program’s carriage more than doubled to more than 150 radio stations, and the audience more than tripled in size. The New York Times called Ray the “thinking man’s talk show host,” and “a national resource.”
During his decades as a broadcaster, Ray also did extensive work as a writer. He wrote the 2013 companion volume to the PBS documentary series, Latino Americans. In 2005, he published an examination of the tightening relationship between religion and electoral politics, The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America. His first book looked at the decades of disinvestment and white flight in urban America, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration. In 2019, the New Press published Truth Has a Power of Its Own, a book featuring conversations about American history between Suarez and historian Howard Zinn.