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 Hawaiian native Ryan Ozawa about a pair of bills in the state legislature that would make the shaka an official state gesture.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly remembers the life of civil rights leader David Mixner with his friend and mentee, Brian Sims.
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In the new book 2054, Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman imagine how the singularity might threaten America and the world 30 years from now.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with World Food Program director Jean-Martin Bauer on the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Haiti as violence has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with CNN chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto about his new book The Return of Great Powers and how close we are to the precipice of a new global order.
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Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen recently spoke out about a law that the U.S. could use to get more aid to people in Gaza. He talks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about what the law is and what it means.
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Daniel Foote, a former American diplomat who was appointed as the special envoy to Haiti after the president was assassinated, speaks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about the current crisis in Haiti.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with reporter Anya Kamenetz about an Arabic-language remote learning program called "Ahlan Simsim." It's a show by the Sesame Workshop, created for Syrian refugees.
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For a few weeks each year, Horsetail Fall at Yosemite national park glows gold just before sunset. They call it the "Firefall." But it only happens if conditions are perfect.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with astrobiologists Catherine Neish and Kevin Hand about missions to Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa, to search for conditions that could support life.