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 Hanna Hopko, an original leader of Ukraine's EuroMaidan protests in 2014 about whether Ukrainians can stand up to the threat of Russian aggression.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Congressmen Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and Congressman Mark Green, R-Tenn., about their trip to Ukraine as the country faces the threat of a Russian invasion.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Eric Gales — who was once a guitar prodigy — about reclaiming a career that was stalled by drug addiction and prison time.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Kristina Kvien who, as the Charge d'Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, is the top American official on the ground in Kyiv.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Ukrainian politician Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze about Ukraine's relationship with the world, which she and many others are counting on as Russia threatens to invade.
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Amid the crisis with Russia, some Ukrainians say their president has come up short. Others, like some of the ones skating in front of the office of the president, say they still support him.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk about the threat of a Russian invasion.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with people in Kyiv about the possibility of a Russian invasion into Ukraine.
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Imani Perry discusses what it meant to write a book about her own home, and why the South is so important to comprehend the rest of the nation. -
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Emmanuel Bonne, the diplomatic and national security advisor to French President Emmanuel Macron, about Russia and Ukraine.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Natalie Jaresko, executive director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, about the territory's recently approved bankruptcy deal.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Rosemary Sullivan about working on a book that potentially reveals who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family.
