Jacki Lyden

In 1997, Jacki published Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, a critically-acclaimed memoir which chronicles her life growing up in the presence of her mother’s profound mental illness. The memoir, which The New York Times described as “vivid, original, lyrical,” was immediately optioned by Wind Dancer Films for Meryl Streep and Gwyneth Paltrow. She has given a myriad of talks on mental illness and still actively partakes in her mother’s care. Jacki is at work on a new memoir, Tell Me Something Good, which frames how life can change in a moment.

She is a 2017-2018 recipient of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism, and early in her career, she won the Grand Prize from the National Mental Health Foundation for a series on the incarceration of the mentally ill in Montana. An avid traveler, Jacki has been all over the world for her work and covered the Middle East for NPR across three conflicts, including both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jacki regards herself first and foremost as a storyteller and looks for the distinctive human voice in a huge range of national and international stories. She has been awarded the Gracie Award for American Women in Radio and Television and has also received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for Broadcasting and Journalism. In 2017, she created “Love Comes in at the Eye,” an annual workshop for memoir and first-person writers and podcasters in Renvyle, Ireland. Jacki is married to the Washington Post photographer, Bill O’Leary and lives in and between her residencies in Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, and rural Wisconsin.