Mary Louise Kelly
Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.
Previously, she spent a decade as national security correspondent for NPR News, and she's kept that focus in her role as anchor. That's meant taking All Things Considered to Russia, North Korea, and beyond (including live coverage from Helsinki, for the infamous Trump-Putin summit). Her past reporting has tracked the CIA and other spy agencies, terrorism, wars, and rising nuclear powers. Kelly's assignments have found her deep in interviews at the Khyber Pass, at mosques in Hamburg, and in grimy Belfast bars.
Kelly first launched NPR's intelligence beat in 2004. After one particularly tough trip to Baghdad — so tough she wrote an essay about it for Newsweek — she decided to try trading the spy beat for spy fiction. Her debut espionage novel, Anonymous Sources, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. It's a tale of journalists, spies, and Pakistan's nuclear security. Her second novel, The Bullet, followed in 2015.
Kelly's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, and other publications. She has lectured at Harvard and Stanford, and taught a course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly serves as a contributing editor at The Atlantic, moderating newsmaker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.
A Georgia native, Kelly's first job was pounding the streets as a political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1996, she made the leap to broadcasting, joining the team that launched BBC/Public Radio International's The World. The following year, Kelly moved to London to work as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and reporter for the BBC World Service.
Kelly graduated from Harvard University in 1993 with degrees in government, French language, and literature. Two years later, she completed a master's degree in European studies at Cambridge University in England.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly's conversation with country music artists Tanya Tucker and Brandi Carlile continues. First they talked about their new documentary, now they talk about their friendship.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with country music artists Tanya Tucker and Brandi Carlile about their documentary, "The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile."
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with novelist Anne Tyler about her latest novel, "French Braid," and why she likes writing about families.
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Measurement officials have expanded the system of prefixes used to describe very large and small numbers, adding "ronna" and "quetta," among others, to the ranks of "giga" and "tera."
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with MSNBC Host Ayman Mohyeldin about what he calls double standards and western prejudice in coverage of Qatar hosting the World Cup.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Kaiser Health News Correspondent Lauren Weber about her investigation into the thousands of public health workers in the U.S. who lost their jobs recently.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with correspondent Anthony Kuhn and then Victor Cha, the Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Adviser, about the latest in North Korea.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Victor Cha, the Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Adviser, about the latest in North Korea.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Georgetown University Professor Paul Butler about the Attorney General naming a special counsel to oversee the federal investigations into former President Trump.
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As Twitter employees and some users have been leaving the platform, they've been tweeting their eulogies — and their love letters to the communities they built there.