Biography
Ray Suarez is a host of the radio and podcast series WorldAffairs, heard on KQED San Francisco and public radio stations around the country, and a Washington reporter for Euronews. He recently completed an appointment as the McCloy Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Suarez hosted Inside Story, a daily news program on Al Jazeera America, until the network ceased operation in 2016.
Suarez joined American public television’s nightly newscast, The PBS NewsHour in 1999 and was a senior correspondent until 2013. During his years at the NewsHour he was assigned to cover global health. His reporting from Africa, Asia, and Latin America won many awards. He hosted NPR’s Talk of the Nation from 1993-1999. In more than 40 years in the news business, he has worked as a reporter in London and Rome, as a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, and for the NBC-owned station WMAQ-TV in Chicago.
Suarez is the author of three books: Latino Americans: The 500 Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2013), The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999, reporting on the causes of the destitution found in American cities after the Second World War, andThe Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America, examining how organized religion and politics intersect in America. His next work, on immigration, political, demographic, and cultural change, will appear in 2023.
He is a contributor to the Oxford Companion to American Politics (June 2012), and many other books, including How I Learned English, Brooklyn: A State of Mind, Saving America's Treasures, and About Men. He’s been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Britain's Independent, Harvard University's Nieman Reports, and the Chicago Tribune.