Lemon Tree (Tolan)

Author Bio 
• Birth—ca. 1956
• Where—Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (?)
• Education—New York University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Sandy Tolan has produced hundreds of documentaries and features for NPR and is a lead producer for Working, a monthly series of profiles for Marketplace on workers around the world. He is a co-founder of Homelands Productions, an independent production company specializing in radio documentaries about land, natural resources, indigenous issues, and the global economy.

Sandy has reported from more than 30 countries, mostly in Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. He is the author of two books, including The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2006), which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award, and which won Booklist’s “Top of the List” award in nonfiction. His other book, Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty- Five Years Later (Free Press, 2000), is an exploration of race, sports, and heroism in America.

Sandy was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has won more than 25 national and international journalism awards, including a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, three Robert F. Kennedy awards, a United Nations Gold Medal award, and two honors from the Overseas Press Club.

From 2000 to 2008 he taught international reporting and radio at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he was an I.F . Stone fellow. In 2007, the eleven reporters in Sandy’s climate change class at the Berkeley J-School won the prestigious George Polk award, the first time the award has been given to students.

In early 2008, Sandy moved  from Berkeley to Los Angeles, where he is Associate Professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

His ongoing projects include Working launched in January 2007 as a regular feature on Marketplace, public radio’s daily show about business and economics. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the series consists of intimate, sound-rich portraits of workers in the global economy. Sandy is also faculty advisor and editor for the FRONTLINE/World Fellowship program, designed to nurture new voices in international reporting and widen the spectrum of stories available to the public, using this award-winning PBS Web site as a publishing platform for outstanding work from a new generation of journalists. (From Sandy Tolan's website.)