AL PESSIN

According to the bio on Amazon: "Al’s to-the-point style and decades of frontline reporting deliver a high-tension veritas few can match.

He has filed from the Afghanistan and Iraq war zones, dined with mujahedeen in Pakistan, interviewed Hamas militants in Gaza, and been posted at the White House and the Pentagon, just to name a few of his relevant assignments.

Al was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years, based in Hong Kong, Islamabad, Beijing, Jerusalem and London. In all, he spent thirty-nine years as a TV/radio broadcaster, correspondent, editor and manager at the Voice of America. His most recent assignments had him reporting from the war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Eastern Ukraine, while previous decades saw him in Gaza, the West Bank, Eastern Turkey, the Philippines and Southeast Asian refugee camps.

After the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, the Chinese government expelled Al for “illegal news gathering” and “fomenting counter-revolutionary rebellion.” That year, he received the Communicator of the Year Award from the National Association of Government Communicators and won a Gold Medal at the International Radio Festivals of New York.

For five years in the 2000s, Al was an adjunct instructor at his alma mater, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He has also spoken on China, journalism and national security at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Virginia. For several years, Al was a member of the editorial board of the Foreign Service Journal."