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 New York Times reporter John Leland about the end of his series of articles following several people who were 85 years and older to the end of their lives.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, from the congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. He and a few other congregants were held hostage at gunpoint for 11 hours.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Peter Zwack, former U.S. Army Brigadier General and global fellow at the Wilson Center, about the possibility of the U.S. arming Ukraine in an insurgency.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Filipe Ribeiro, the Afghanistan representative for Doctors Without Borders, to hear about the severe lack of food the country is facing.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Mary Mayhew, president of the Florida Hospital Association, about how the state's hospitals are navigating the Supreme Court's decision on vaccine mandates.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly chats with Kholood Khair, managing partner of a think tank in Khartoum, about ongoing pro-democracy protests in Sudan.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with CBS photojournalist John Schreiber about the thousands of abandoned packages along the Union Pacific train tracks in Los Angeles, signaling large-scale cargo theft.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Mubin Shaikh, counter extremism specialist and public safety professor at Canada's Seneca College, on Aafia Siddiqui's influence in the recent Texas hostage crisis.
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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.
