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 Maria Valdes of Chicago's Field Museum about a fresh haul of meteorites she and other scientists collected in Antarctica.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with co-authors Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy about their new book Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies.
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Jealousy. Power struggles. Political infighting. This week's shake-up of Putin's top commanders in charge of Russia's invasion in Ukraine have it all, according to some security experts. -
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks to Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, about what's behind a significant change of command for Russian forces in the war in Ukraine.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Ben Bacon, a London-based furniture conservator, about decoding a 20,000-year-old writing system.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with the former Defense secretary about the special counsel assigned to review the classified documents found in the possession of President Biden.
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MIT Technology Review has released its annual list of breakthrough technologies. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Amy Nordrum, an editor who helped put the list together.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Guilherme Casarões, political science professor in Brazil, about the parallels between Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the wake of riots in the Brazilian capital.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with veteran Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas about how he's making sense of last week's chaos in electing Kevin McCarthy as House speaker.
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Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba details the so-called ceasefire, the options he believes Vladimir Putin has left, and what counts as a victory for Ukraine from here on.
