Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Socrates Program

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield (2015) and  The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), about a young entrepreneur who supported her community under the Taliban. Lemmon has recently committed to write her next book for Penguin Press on what ISIS has left in its wake in NE Syria: the world’s most radical experiment in women’s equality in the least likely place. Lemmon serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Her TED Talk on Ashley’s War has received more than a million views, and her TED Talk on the power of women entrepreneurs opened the TEDxWomen conference in 2011.  She serves as partner and Chief Marketing Officer at the technology firm Shield AI, an artificial intelligence company focused on deploying AI to protect service members and civilians. Along with her national security work, she has reported and written extensively on topics including child marriage in the United States for PBS and on school choice, single moms and the power and importance of girls’ ambition for The Atlantic. A graduate of the University of Missouri and the Harvard Business School, she is a Fulbright Scholar, a Robert Bosch fellow and a board member of the non-profits Mercy Corps and the International Center for Research on Women.