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.
-
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes a wartime visit to Ukraine
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Mika Golubovsky, English-language editor of Mediazona, about what Russians are saying about the chaos of Ukraine's major incursion.
-
Ukraine is on day four of a surprise attack on Kursk, some 330 miles south of Moscow. Videos are emerging of burned out Russian vehicles, Russians surrendering and long lines of Russian cars fleeing.
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Feliz Solomon, a Wall Street Journal reporter who tracked a network of criminal syndicates that enslave people in a multibillion dollar cyber fraud industry.
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Christopher Schuetze, a reporter with the New York Times who’s been covering a foiled terrorist attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Rebecca Allensworth, who teaches antitrust law at Vanderbilt Law School, about what comes next for Google and its users after it lost a major antitrust lawsuit.
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi about her new book The Art of Power and her interactions with the Bush White House during the 2008 financial crisis.
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan about his new book, "Midnight in Moscow."
-
Nancy Pelosi opens up about wielding power — and what she was doing in the days leading up to President Joe Biden announcing he was abandoning his race for a second term
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Sofia Nelson, a former close friend of vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance, about how he's changed from the person they knew for more than a decade.