Melissa Block
As special correspondent and guest host of NPR's news programs, Melissa Block brings her signature combination of warmth and incisive reporting. Her work over the decades has earned her journalism's highest honors, and has made her one of NPR's most familiar and beloved voices.
As co-host of All Things Considered from 2003 to 2015, Block's reporting took her everywhere from the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the heart of Rio de Janeiro; from rural Mozambique to the farthest reaches of Alaska.
Her riveting reporting from Sichuan, China, during and after the massive earthquake in 2008 brought the tragedy home to millions of listeners around the world. At the moment the earthquake hit, Block had the presence of mind to record a gripping, real-time narration of the seismic upheaval she was witnessing. Her long-form story about a desperate couple searching in the rubble for their toddler son was singled out by judges who awarded NPR's earthquake coverage the top honors in broadcast journalism: the George Foster Peabody Award, duPont-Columbia Award, Edward R. Murrow Award, National Headliner Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award.
Now, as special correspondent, Block continues to engage both the heart and the mind with her reporting on issues from gun violence to adult illiteracy to opioid addiction.
In 2017, she traveled the country for the series "Our Land," visiting a wide range of communities to explore how our identity is shaped by where we live. For that series, she paddled along the Mississippi River, went in search of salmon off the Alaska coast, and accompanied an immigrant family as they became U.S. citizens. Her story about the legacy of the Chinese community in the Mississippi Delta earned her a James Beard Award in 2018.
Block is the recipient of the 2019 Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism, awarded by the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, as well as the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fulbright Association.
Block began her career at NPR in 1985 as an editorial assistant for All Things Considered, and rose through the ranks to become the program's senior producer.
She was a reporter and correspondent in New York from 1994 to 2002, a period punctuated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Her reporting after those attacks helped earn NPR a George Foster Peabody Award. Block's reporting on rape as a weapon of war in Kosovo was cited by the Overseas Press Club of America in awarding NPR the Lowell Thomas Award in 1999.
Block is a 1983 graduate of Harvard University and spent the following year on a Fulbright fellowship in Geneva, Switzerland. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband — writer Stefan Fatsis — and their daughter.
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Members of the Boy Scouts of America voted on Thursday to allow gay members.
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Melissa Block talks to Jon Hamilton about the science of tornadoes.
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There is one place in the country where a law enforcement agency can trace a gun found at a crime scene back to a buyer: the ATF's National Tracing Center in West Virginia. But the tracing process is usually tedious, involving multiple phone calls and searching, by hand, through paper records.
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Boeing's 787 will be allowed to return to passenger service soon. The Federal Aviation Administration has approved Boeing's redesign of the battery system that caused serious problems, including a fire on one plane. The batteries and their housing have been redesigned and both Boeing and the FAA are confident they are safe. Melissa Block talks with Wendy Kaufman.
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Melissa Block talks to Ari Shapiro about President Obama's remarks after the Senate rejected a proposal to expand background checks before gun purchases.
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A Defense Intelligence Agency report suggests that North Korea has the ability to make nuclear weapons small enough to put on a missile. That does not necessarily mean that North Korea has the capacity to launch a nuclear attack.
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Paul Gwaltney and other gun owners don't understand why many Americans are so anti-gun. So Gwaltney assembled a group of friends and colleagues with divergent views on guns and gun control for a frank conversation at his home in Chantilly, Va. -
Charles Foster Jr., 24, died on New Year's Day in Columbus, Ga., just one of tens of thousands of Americans who will be killed by a firearm this year. While mass shootings like the one in Newtown, Conn., attract a frenzy of media coverage, most gun homicides, like Foster's, garner little news attention. -
There is a growing strike by police officers in Egypt. Long accused of brutality before and after the fall of the Mubarak regime, police commanders say they are ill-equipped to handle the ongoing protests, many of them violent, in Port Said and other cities. They are demanding the ouster of the new Interior Minister, appointed by President Mohammed Morsi. The strike comes amid fears of more violence on Saturday when a court in Cairo is scheduled to hand down a second group of verdicts and sentences in connection with a soccer riot that left 70 dead last year.
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The first major gun bills in nearly two decades had their first hearing in the Senate on Thursday, including an assault weapons ban and a ban on so-called "straw purchases." Still, even in the aftermath of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., the legislation faces an uphill battle. Ailsa Chang talks to Melissa Block.
