March 28, 2024

Event Coverage Highlight

Book Night: Jason Rezaian’s ‘Prisoner’

Join the OPC for a very special event. Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter who spent almost two years in Tehran’s Evin prison, will discuss his book Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison–Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out.

Moderator: Farnaz Fassihi, Senior Writer at The Wall Street Journal.

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Rezaian is one of the few Western journalists to have been based in Tehran in recent years. From 2009 until his arrest in 2014 he covered stories that tried to explain Iran to a general American audience, first as a freelancer for a variety of outlets and later as The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief.

He reported on two presidential elections, Iran’s nuclear negotiations with global powers, the effects of one of the most punitive sanctions regimes in modern times and environmental issues.
In between the big news events, he told the stories of everyday Iranians, reporting on Iran’s small community of baseball players, the quest for the best high-end hamburger in Tehran, and a clinic for female drug addicts.

In July of 2014 Rezaian and his wife were detained in their home and he went on to spend 544 days in prison. He was released on the same day that the historic nuclear deal between Iran and world powers was implemented.

Fassihi covers diplomacy at the U.N. and foreign policy following a 14-year career as a war correspondent in the Middle East. She has covered 6 wars and many uprisings from the invasion of Afghanistan to Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and beyond. She has won numerous national awards including two OPC awards and last year was honored with an Ellis Island Medal of Honor. She is the author of a book on the Iraq war, Waiting for an Ordinary Day.