Robin Wright
Award-Winning Journalist & Author
Robin Wright
Award-Winning Journalist & Author
Biography
Robin Wright is a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker and a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has reported from more than 150 countries on seven continents and has covered dozens of wars, revolutions and uprisings worldwide. She is a former diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs and many others. Wright has also been a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as well as Yale, Duke, Stanford, Dartmouth and the University of California.
Among several awards, Wright received the U.N. Correspondents Gold Medal, the National Magazine Award for reportage from Iran in The New Yorker and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative" for coverage of African wars. The American Academy of Diplomacy selected Wright as the journalist of the year for her “distinguished reporting and analysis of international affairs.” She also won the National Press Club Award for diplomatic reporting and is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awardee.
She lectures extensively around the United States and has been a television commentator on morning and evening news programs on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN and MSNBC as well as Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Nightline, PBS Newshour, Frontline, Washington Week in Review, Hardball, Morning Joe, Anderson Cooper 360, Fareed Zakaria GPS, Jake Tapper on CNN, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, The Colbert Report and HBO’s Real Time.
Wright’s most recent book is Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World. It was selected as the Best Book on International Affairs by the Overseas Press club. Her other books include Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (2008), which The New York Times and The Washington Post both selected as one of the most notable books of the year. She was the editor of The Iran Primer: Power, Politics and U.S. Policy (2010). Her other books include The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran (2000), which was selected as one of the 25 most memorable books of the year 2000 by the New York Library Association; Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (2001); Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World (1991); and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (1989). Wright is currently working on a book about the people who make war and peace.
Speaker Videos
Future of the Middle East
Traveling Though the Middle East
Speech Topics
The Future of the Middle East
Wright takes a look at the activists and movements now beginning to change the world's most volatile region. The challenges are still many. But almost a decade after the 9/11 attacks, a wide array of characters – from feminists and bloggers, thinkers and judges, religious leaders and students – are rejecting extremism while also challenging the status quo in unusual ways.
Women of the World
Women are one of the two most important engines of change worldwide in the 21st century. From a woman born into a Moroccan harem to a South African doctor taking on poverty and an Iranian human rights lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize, an eclectic array of women are redefining the goals and means of activism. Hear their stories from someone who has met them and can analyze what they mean for countries around the world.