Background

Dina Temple-Raston was born on August 25, 1964, in Brussels, Belgium. She is the daughter of John Clark and Sandra Hughes Temple Raston.

Education

Dina Temple-Raston studied at Redwood High School. Then she attended Northwestern University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts with honors in 1986. She also graduated from Liaoning University in 1989. Moreover, Temple-Raston received a Master of Arts at Columbia University in 2006.

Career

Dina Temple-Raston is a journalist and former foreign correspondent. She served as a special foreign assistant at the Liaoning Provincial Government in 1988-1989. Then she held a position of a correspondent at the Asiaweek for one year. Later, Temple-Raston joined Bloomberg News, where she was a Hong Kong correspondent in 1991-1993 and White House correspondent in 1993-2000. She also worked as an economics correspondent at USA Today in 2000-2001 and a producer at the Cable News Network Financial Network. Additionally, Temple-Raston served at the New York Sun. She began as a foreign editor and then became a City Hall Bureau Chief at the beginning of 2002.

In her first book, A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption, Dina Temple-Raston draws heavily on her skills as a journalist. In 1998, in the small town of Jasper, Texas, a black man was dragged to his death while chained behind a pickup truck. Three white supremacists were charged with the murder and later convicted. The author chronicles what happened to the community in the aftermath of the murder.

In her next book, Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation's Quest for Redemption, Temple-Raston tells a story of genocide in 1994 Rwanda when the Hutu majority were incited by newspapers and radio journalists to slaughter the Tutsi, who dominated positions in government and society. The author examines the journalists' motives and delves into the social and political world of Rwanda. She also reflects on the journalists' trial and updates the reader on Rwanda a decade after the destruction.

Before taking a job as a Federal Bureau of Investigation correspondent in 2007 at National Public Radio, Temple-Raston took a two-year sabbatical. During that time, she wrote two books, learned Arabic, and completed a master's at Columbia University's School of Journalism. One of the two books written during this time is In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror, which she wrote with Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the oldest non-governmental organization in the United States dedicated to upholding civil liberties and human rights. The book recounts several different tales of Americans' struggles for freedom and fairness since 9/11, including the story of John Walker Lindh, an American who was captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan while serving as a soldier for the Taliban.

The second book that Temple-Raston completed during her two-year sabbatical is The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in an Age of Terror. It is the story of six young American-born Yemeni Muslims in Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo in western New York, whose lives took a turn for the worse when the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested five of them not too long after 9/11 for attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

Achievements

• Dina Temple-Raston is best known as a journalist and writer. She is also the holder of the Prize for a top essay from Northwestern University in 1986, the Discover Great New Writers Program Award from Barnes & Noble for her book, Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption, in 2002, and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Manhattanville College.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Justice on the Grass

    (In a gripping narrative that examines the power of the pr...)

    2005
  • The Jihad Next Door

    (This is a story of pre-emptive imprisonment for an act of...)

    2007
  • In Defense of Our America

    (The book tracks the case of Matthew Limon, a gay teenager...)

    2007
  • A Death in Texas

    (It is an extraordinary account of how a small Texas town ...)

    2002

Views

Quotations: "In America today, Muslims have become in a lot of ways the new blacks. There's an expression in the black community that they are "born suspect." Now Muslims are "born suspect." People who should know better will narrow their lids when they see a Muslim come on the airplane or get on the bus with a backpack. There are certain assumptions people make about Muslims in this country now, and that got me interested."

Membership

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  Council on Foreign Relations , United States

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  White House Correspondents' Association , United States

Connections

Dina Temple-Raston married Frank Coleman on October 9, 1993.

Father:

John Clark Raston

Mother:

Sandra Hughes Temple Raston

colleague:

Anthony D. Romero

Anthony Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's premier defender of civil liberties.

husband:

Frank S. Coleman

References

• Dina Temple-Raston - Facebook
• @NPRDina - Twitter