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 talks with Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, about why summer solstice came so early this year and what it signifies.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Aaron Mackey with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a nonprofit which advocates for civil liberties in the digital world — about warning labels on social media.
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President Biden announced Tuesday new executive actions to protect an estimated half million undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from being deported.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Kristen Waggoner, CEO and general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom, about Supreme Court preserved access to Mifepristone.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Michael Bommer, a man dying of colon cancer who created an AI avatar of himself for his wife, Anett, to interact with after he dies.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Patti Davis about Hunter Biden's trial, addiction, and the pressure of the public spotlight.
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Voters may not have foreign policy at the top of their list of concerns, but it is a major part of a U.S. president's role.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks to reporter Annie Aguiar about her article in Poynter titled "What do horse race journalists think of ‘horse race journalism'?"
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks to author Glynnis Macnicol about her new memoir, I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is pushing a U.S. truce "roadmap" at a regional aid conference in Jordan.