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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Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the U.S. is planning "things that we have not done in the past" if Russia invades Ukraine. Where do things stand now, and what can the U.S. do at this point? -
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the United States' role in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
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Yao Pan Ma, 61, died on New Year's Eve of injuries from an April 2021 attack. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with his family's spokesperson Karlin Chan about ongoing violence against Asian Americans.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with reporter Hannah Dreyfus from ProPublica about the $5.2 billion of welfare funds that were left unspent by states, despite poverty in the U.S. worsening.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Gwen Kirby about her debut collection of short stories Shit Cassandra Saw and why it is empowering to get to be a complicated woman.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi about his new film, A Hero. The story examines the complexity of what appears to many to be a good deed.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Melinda Haring, Deputy Director for Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, on the situation in Kazakhstan and its implications for the rest of the world.
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NPR's Mary Louise talks with Christine Brennan from USA Today about sports and vaccines, as sports leagues everywhere are scrambling to find enough healthy athletes to fill out rosters during omicron.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., about leading an impeachment effort against President Trump. Raskin was inside the Capitol building on Jan. 6.
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The reigning Australian Open men's champion Novak Djokovic — who is famously skeptical about the COVID vaccine and received a medical exemption from being vaccinated — was not admitted to the country.
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In the face of rising COVID cases, Dr. Bob Wachter of the University of California San Francisco offers reasons to be hopeful about the pandemic's outlook in the months ahead.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va., about being one of the many people stuck in his car overnight when hundreds of vehicles were stranded Interstate 95 outside of Virginia.
