Ron Suskind
Class of 1977
Journalist-Author-Producer
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Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, bestselling author, producer of award-winning documentaries and feature films, and the founder of Bongomedia. While a student at Concord HS, Ron was very active in the Delaware Boys Junior Tennis program and was a state runner-up in 3rd singles for the Raider’s tennis team.
He was also known to grace the CHS stage as a budding actor (Damn Yankees). After graduating from Concord in 1977, he attended the University of Virginia where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1981. He then went on to earn a master’s in journalism at Columbia University in 1983.
Upon graduation, Ron took a job writing for the New York Times. In 1987 he began a six-year term as Writer-in-Residence at Harvard University. He joined the Wall Street Journal in 1990 and within three years became the senior national affairs reporter. Ron won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for Feature Writing for a series of articles about Cedric Jennings, an underprivileged student at Ballou High School in Washington, D.C., who aspired to attend MIT.
In 1998, Ron further developed the Cedric Jennings articles into his first best-selling book A Hope in the Unseen - An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League.
From 2004 through 2011, Ron published four additional best-selling non-fiction books: The Price of Loyalty (2004), The One Percent Doctrine (2006), The Way of the World (2008) and Confidence Men (2011). During this period, Ron appeared as a guest on CBS’s 60 Minutes, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Nightline and PBS’s Charley Rose.
In 2014, Ron’s family took center stage in his book Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes and Autism. Ron’s son, Owen, at the age of three, once a chatty toddler, lost his speech and vanished into autism. Life, Animated chronicled the family’s communication challenges and the subsequent breakthrough using Disney character voices to connect with Owen. This compelling story became the basis for the award-winning documentary Life, Animated co-produced and directed by Roger Ross Williams, with Ron as the executive producer. Life, Animated was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2017. The film was the 2018 Emmy Award Winner for Best Documentary.
In 2021, Ron co-produced the Oscar-nominated film Don’t Look Up starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, Tyler Perry, and Cate Blanchett. He is the founder of the Affinity Project, which leads efforts to build technology for people who are differently abled.
Ron currently lives in Cambridge, MA, with his wife, Cornelia Kennedy Suskind, and lectures about narrative and justice at Harvard Law School.
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