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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In Michigan, a push to encourage voters to send President Biden a message about his refusal to call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza may have worked. Here's how his campaign moves forward. -
If the Russian president continues to burn through his reserves of oil and gas money, ordinary people will become a threat to his power, according to one outspoken activist. -
When the U.S. launched airstrikes over the past week in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the idea was to send a message to another country: Iran. -
Gun owners in California can no longer carry firearms into a range of locations deemed "sensitive spaces." It is already facing all kinds of hurdles in the courts. -
More than 19 million people have already signed up for health insurance through the marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act. And you can still enroll through Jan. 16. -
What have journalists learned from covering the 2016 and 2020 elections? How can we do better? We asked the man who led The Washington Post through the Trump presidency. -
China's president says success for the U.S. and China can be mutually beneficial. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo says that the reality is a bit more complicated than that. -
There are days when you head out to report a story, and you think you know where it's going. And then it spins in an entirely different direction. This is the story of one such day. -
The Old City of Jerusalem is thousands of years old. People from all over the world travel here to see the expansive history and the foundation of religions and empires — until now. -
Qassem Ali is one of the few people allowed to leave Gaza since the conflict with Israel began more than four weeks ago. He describes the anger and sadness he felt as he left.
