Ray Suarez

Ray Suarez is host of the new PBS television series, Wisdom Keepers, on air and online on PBS content services. 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.  He is the 

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. 

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.