fbpx

Al Pessin

Al Pessin headshot

Al Pessin is an award-winning journalist, author and playwright. Kensington published his first novel, Sandblast, on March 31, 2020. The first of the Task Force Epsilon thrillers, Sandblast was a top-five finisher in the Unpublished Book of the Year competition at the 2018 Royal Palm Literary Awards and a shortlist selection for the 2017 Bosque Fiction Prize. Sandblast is the story of an Afghan-American U.S. Army lieutenant who goes undercover inside the Taliban to find the new global terrorism mastermind, and his boss, a woman at the Pentagon with West Point and two combat tours behind her, who has to fight the top brass and even the president to keep her agent alive and his mission on track. The first sequel, Blowback, was published March 1, 2021, with a second sequel Shock Wave scheduled for early 2022. Al’s farce Murder at the Butcher’s won the top award for scripts at the 2019 Royal Palm Literary Awards, and played four sold-out performances at the Willow Theatre in Boca Raton (FL) that November. Al was a journalist for the Voice of America for 39 years, including correspondent postings in Hong Kong, Islamabad, Beijing, Jerusalem and London. He was a member of the White House press corps in the 1990s, and covered the Pentagon from 2006-11, including numerous visits to the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. Al also covered democracy movements on Manila’s EDSA Boulevard, Kyiv’s Independence Square and Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He was expelled from China after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 for “illegal news gathering” and “fomenting counter-revolutionary rebellion.” Among other honors, that year he won a Gold Medal at the International Radio Festivals of New York and the Communicator of the Year Award from the National Association of Government Communicators. Al has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Politico, TheHill.com, DefenseOne and several other publications. He is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, the Florida Writers Association, and the Authors Guild. Al lives in Delray Beach, FL with his wife Audrey and their precocious Labrador, Rory. Contact Al through www.alpessin.com.

Share This Speaker

More Speakers

A.G.BILLIG

A.G. Billig – Writer, Author Coach, Founder of Self-Publishing Mastery A.G. Billig is a multifaceted

Adrienne Monson

Adrienne Monson is an award-winning hybrid author who has been hailed by MSN as a

Headshot of Alexia Gordon

Alexia Gordon

Alexia Gordon is a physician by day and an award-winning, #ownvoices crime novelist by night.