Journalist Al Pessin’s first novel, the thriller SANDBLAST, will be published by Kensington Publishing Corp. in early 2020. The book was shortlisted for the 2017 Bosque Fiction Award and was a top-five selection among all unpublished book-length submissions, fiction and nonfiction, in the 2018 Royal Palm Literary Awards, presented by the Florida Writers Association. His short, short story, JIMMY’S HOUR was also a 2018 RPLA finalist. Al’s to-the-point style and decades of frontline reporting deliver a high-tension veritas few can match. He has covered U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, dined with anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Pakistan, interviewed Hamas militants in Gaza, and been a member of the White House and Pentagon press corps. Al was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years, based in Hong Kong, Islamabad, Beijing, Jerusalem and London. In all, he spent thirty-nine years as a TV/radio broadcaster, correspondent, editor and manager at the Voice of America. His most recent assignments had him reporting from the war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Eastern Ukraine, as well as Tahrir Square in Cairo and Independence Square in Kyiv. Previous decades saw him in Gaza, the West Bank, Eastern Turkey, the Philippines and SE Asia. After the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, the Chinese government expelled Al for “illegal news gathering” and “fomenting counter-revolutionary rebellion.” That year, he received the Communicator of the Year Award from the National Association of Government Communicators and won a Gold Medal at the International Radio Festivals of New York. For five years in the 2000s, Al was an adjunct instructor at his alma mater, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, where he taught a graduate course on national security journalism. He has also been on China panels at Harvard and Stanford, and gave a seminar on U.S. national security the University of Virginia in 2010. For several years, Al was a member of the editorial board of the Foreign Service Journal. In 2016, Al had a humor piece about the presidential election published on politico.com. In recent years, he has also been published in the Los Angeles Times, thehill.com and DefenseOne.com. Earlier in his career, he had long-form articles in The Quill, The Gannett Center Journal, and the Northwestern Alumni Magazine Al’s two-act play, a farce called MURDER AT THE BUTCHER’S, will be produced by a professional theater company in South Florida in 2019. He is currently working on the first of two planned sequels to SANDBLAST. Al lives in Florida with his wife Audrey and their precocious Labrador Rory.