Robin Wright

Robin Wright has reported from more than 140 countries on six continents for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Sunday Times of London, CBS News and The Christian Science Monitor. She has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, TIME, The New York Times Magazine, The International Herald Tribune, and many others.

Her foreign tours include five years in the Middle East, two years in Europe, seven years in Africa, and several years as a roving foreign correspondent. She has covered a dozen wars and several revolutions. She most recently covered US foreign policy for The Washington Post.

The American Academy of Diplomacy selected Wright as the journalist of the year for her “distinguished reporting and analysis of international affairs” in 2004, the same year she won the National Press Club award for diplomatic reporting. In 2003, Wright was awarded the UN Correspondents Association Gold Medal for analysis and coverage of international affairs. Among many other awards, she has also received the National Magazine Award for her reportage from Iran in The New Yorker and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initia¬tive" for coverage of African wars. She has also been the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant.

Besides a long career in journalism, Wright has been a fellow at Yale University, Duke University, Stanford University, the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Southern California. She has been a television commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN and MSNBC programs, including Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Nightline, Frontline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Washington Week in Review, The Colbert Report, and HBO’s Real Time.

Wright’s most recent book is Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, published in 2008, which was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Among her other books are The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran and Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam, one of the first books on Islamic extremism. She is also the co-author of Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade. Wright is now based at the Wilson Center while she works on a new book on the future of the Islamic world.