Ray Suarez
Renowned Broadcaster, Author & Host, On Shifting Ground, NPR Veteran
Ray Suarez
Renowned Broadcaster, Author & Host, On Shifting Ground, NPR Veteran
Biography
Ray Suarez is host of the new PBS television series, Wisdom Keepers, on air and online on PBS. He is the author of the recent book on the modern era of American immigration, We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century, published by Little, Brown.
Until the end of 2024 he was host of the public radio program and podcast On Shifting Ground, for seven years. The program was produced by Commonwealth Club-World Affairs and KQED-FM, and broadcast on public radio stations nationwide.
He is also the author of Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2013), The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America (Harper, 2005), and The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration (Free Press, 1999).
He has been a visiting professor of Political Science at NYU Shanghai, and the John McCloy Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. He is a graduate of New York University and the University of Chicago.
Earlier in his career, Suarez was the host of the daily news program Inside Story from Al Jazeera America, Chief National Correspondent for The PBS NewsHour, and the host of Talk of the Nation from NPR. His recent podcast productions include two seasons of Going for Broke, produced with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and The Things I Thought About When My Body Was Trying to Kill Me, from Evergreen Podcasts, about cancer, treatment and recovery.
Suarez’ journalism has been recognized with two DuPont-Columbia Awards, an Overseas Press Club Award, the Ruben Salazar Award from UNIDOS-US, and UCLA’s Public Policy Leadership Award for his reporting on urban America, among others.
Speaker Videos
How Latino Americans Shaped the U.S., Fought for Acceptance
2021 Commencement Speech Longwood University
Cover America Like a Foreign Country
The Impact of Religion in Politics
The Next America
Truth vs Feelings
Speech Topics
America 2.0
The US Census Bureau projects that sometime in the mid-2040s a majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to Africa, Asia, and Latin America rather than to Europe. You might have predicted one kind of cultural shift in November, 2008 when Barack Obama was elected, and find yourself anticipating a different march to that next America today, with President Trump in the Oval Office. Americans under- and oversell how the country will change when this historic shift occurs. I’ll take you on a tour of that next America, and how we get there.
Fake News!
Who do you believe? How do you make up your mind what’s happening in the country? For much of the last century, the American news business was a model for the rest of the world. American reporting was diverse, free, unregulated and guided by an evolving set of professional norms that gave it great credibility. What happened? Public confidence in the news business has cratered, and a parallel business has risen to become its rival, filled with invention, lies, distortion and the quiet goal of sowing confusion and continuing doubt that what is reported is true. It’s been a surprising, and destructive march from The Pentagon Papers to Woodward and Bernstein to the Wild West of information.
The Things I Thought About When My Body Was Surviving Cancer
Every year, 100,000 new cases of colon cancer are diagnosed, sending people’s lives into a whirlwind as they begin treatment and come to terms with their illness. Ray Suarez’s cancer diagnosis propelled him through a cycle of emotions. Anger, sadness, tranquility and dissociation made Suarez wonder if the mind and body were connected. Did his life really belong to him? Suarez grappled with these questions and thoughts as he asserted himself over a disease that seemed impossible to control. In this honest and vulnerable talk, he shares his cancer journey and survivorship, inspiring audiences to reevaluate the meaning of life.
The New Secular America
Americans are, and have been for generations, the most religious people in the wealthy, industrial West. But with each new year, more Americans are dropping away from congregational and religious affiliation, and they’re doing it as a speed never before seen in our history. What’s happening inside American religion? Is this is a blip, or just a delayed trip to where our European cousins have been for decades? A more secular America will force changes in our politics, our culture, our charitable sector, and not least…a big change in who we think we are as a people.
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