Sandy Tolan is a best-selling author and an award-winning radio and print journalist.
He is a professor at the University of Southern California (USC)’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, as well as the director of the Specialized Journalism graduate progam. He is a co-founder of Homelands Productions, which for 25 years has produced international documentary and features for public radio.
Sandy’s latest book is Bittersweet Empire (William Morrow, 2027), about the billionaire family behind America’s sugar business. He is also the author of the international best-seller, The Lemon Tree, an acclaimed history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
About Sandy
Work in the Field
Sandy is an award-winning radio and print journalist, narrative nonfiction writer, and a recognized media expert and speaker on issues that affect the people of Palestine and Israel. Since 1982, he has reported from more than 40 countries and territories, including American Indian country, along the U.S.-Mexico border, across New England and the American West, South and East Asia, and specializing in the Middle East, Latin America, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. A central focus of his work has been the intersection of land conflicts, racial and ethnic identity, natural resources, and the global economy.
Sandy has published work for more than three dozen outlets, including he The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, CNN, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Frontline, The Newshour and Salon. He has produced dozens of acclaimed documentaries and features for National Public Radio (NPR), Marketplace, Public Radio International (PRI) and the Public Radio Exchange (PRX).
He is a co-founder of Homelands Productions, an independent journalism collective and production company focusing on documentary work for public radio. Audio documentary work includes Vanishing Homelands (1992-93), Searching for Solutions (1994), Working (2007-08), and Food for Nine Billion (2011-2014). He has done extensive audio reporting in the West Bank and Gaza for NPR, Living on Earth and other outlets.
Sandy is the author of four books: Me and Hank, The Lemon Tree, Children of the Stone, and Bittersweet Empire, forthcoming in January 2027. Sandy Tolan’s work has been honored with more than 25 national and international awards, including a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, a United Nations Gold Medal award, and a George Polk Award.
Teaching
Sandy is a professor at the University of Southern California (USC)’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles. where he teaches audio and print narrative journalism. Since joining the faculty in 2008, he has led a number of in-depth, multimedia projects with his colleagues, students and professional partners on international migration, civil conflict, high school students, and low-wage labor in California for “The California Report” (KQED), KCRW, Global Post, LAist, PRX, and other renowned outlets. These include “Hunger in the Golden State”; (2010), “At Risk in the Trump Era,” (2017); “How Covid Changed Everything” (2023), “LA on the Margins” (2024), “Altadena: After the Fires” (2025), and “Resilience in the Age of ICE”; (2026). The latter four series were produced in collaboration with co-professor Megan Donis.
From 2000 to 2007, Sandy taught international reporting, radio feature and documentary classes at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. For several years he coordinated the school’s International Reporting Project. In 2006, the 11 student reporters in his “Early Signs” climate change class, who produced an eight-part series, “Reports From a Warming Planet,” for Salon and NPR’s “Living On Earth” won the prestigious George Polk Award. It was the first time students had been honored with the award.