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 speaks with Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States as Russia's war with Ukraine stretches into a fifth year.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Norah O'Donnell about her new book, "We the Women," which chronicles the stories of the women who built America.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with conservative podcaster Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, about what he hopes to hear from President Trump tonight in the State of the Union.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Bridget Brink, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who's now running for Congress, about the U.S.'s next moves in brokering peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with organized crime expert Steven Dudley about "El Mencho" and what the death of the cartel leader means for the fight against drug trafficking in Mexico.
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Figure skater Alysa Liu made a gold-winning comeback. She shared her new outlook on skating.
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NPR's science podcast Short Wave talk about how ultrarunning affects the body, the trend of intermittent fasting and how to protect people's mental health when they talk with chatbots.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Sky and Amanda Roberts, family members of the late Virginia Giuffre, now that the former Prince Andrew has been arrested by police in the U.K.
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the annual Munich Security Conference; European stakeholders are reassured but still wary.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks to Chrystia Freeland, former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and current economic adviser to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, about Ukraine.
