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 Dr. Lucy McBride, doctor of internal medicine and podcast host, about managing election anxiety.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Brewster Khale, the founder of Internet Archive, about the attack by hackers that put the archive offline for days -- and what may have happened if it had succeeded.
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Donald Trump made a campaign stop in New York Sunday at a rally in Madison Square Garden. What’s making big headlines today are the racist and misogynistic jokes from the speakers before him.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon about her poem engraved on NASA's spaceship headed 1.8 billion miles to the Jupiter moon of Europa.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Yair Golan, an Israeli general now in the reserves, about how conflicts in the Middle East have escalated since Hamas' attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with U.S. diplomat Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, about the leverage the U.S. has in ceasefire talks and the Mideast conflict.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro about his swing state, which has 19 electoral votes up for grabs.
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As the presidential race ramps up in Georgia, one vital voting demographic is mobilizing and hoping to impact the race: young people. -
After the remnants of Hurricane Helene ripped through Southern Appalachia, Clemson University in South Carolina went ahead with its homecoming game. With resources scarce, some residents were furious.
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Is Georgia ready to cast its 16 electoral votes for a woman for president? We put that question to three women who have lived through a few election cycles in the state. -
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Karim Khan, the lead prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, about the pager explosions and conflict in the Middle East.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks to former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan -- a lifelong Republican -- about why he's endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris this election.
