Noel King
Noel King is a host of Morning Edition and Up First.
Previously, as a correspondent at Planet Money, Noel's reporting centered on economic questions that don't have simple answers. Her stories have explored what is owed to victims of police brutality who were coerced into false confessions, how institutions that benefited from slavery are atoning to the descendants of enslaved Americans, and why a giant Chinese conglomerate invested millions of dollars in her small, rural hometown. Her favorite part of the job is finding complex, and often conflicted, people at the center of these stories.
Noel has also served as a fill-in host for Weekend All Things Considered and 1A from NPR Member station WAMU.
Before coming to NPR, she was a senior reporter and fill-in host for Marketplace. At Marketplace, she investigated the causes and consequences of inequality. She spent five months embedded in a pop-up news bureau examining gentrification in an L.A. neighborhood, listened in as low-income and wealthy residents of a single street in New Orleans negotiated the best way to live side-by-side, and wandered through Baltimore in search of the legacy of a $100 million federal job-creation effort.
Noel got her start in radio when she moved to Sudan a few months after graduating from college, at the height of the Darfur conflict. From 2004 to 2007, she was a freelancer for Voice of America based in Khartoum. Her reporting took her to the far reaches of the divided country. From 2007 - 2008, she was based in Kigali, covering Rwanda's economic and social transformation, and entrenched conflicts in the the Democratic Republic of Congo. From 2011 to 2013, she was based in Cairo, reporting on Egypt's uprising and its aftermath for PRI's The World, the CBC, and the BBC.
Noel was part of the team that launched The Takeaway, a live news show from WNYC and PRI. During her tenure as managing producer, the show's coverage of race in America won an RTDNA UNITY Award. She also served as a fill-in host of the program.
She graduated from Brown University with a degree in American Civilization, and is a proud native of Kerhonkson, NY.
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The Food and Drug Administration's authorization of a COVID-19 vaccine could come in a day or two, a member of an FDA expert panel says. But he says it may be late 2021 before normalcy returns.
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Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, says people in some of the highest-risk groups will likely be starting vaccinations this month. -
In a new book, Chris Stedman asks what it means to be real in a time when humans are interacting in digital spaces more than ever. -
Dr. Jamie Riha, a critical care specialist in the intensive care unit at the Billings Clinic, says "tough decisions will have to be made" if coronavirus cases continue to grow at the current pace. -
NPR's Noel King speaks with Valzhyna Mort about her poetry amid the political crisis in Belarus. Her new book of poems is called Music for the Dead and Resurrected. -
A new survey of Indian American voters finds they heavily favor Biden over Trump. Both campaigns have been reaching out to Indian Americans, a small but potentially decisive voting bloc. -
The 25-year-old trap titan discusses his songwriting process, his experience in the criminal justice system and why, even as one of the biggest rappers alive, he doesn't believe he's made it just yet. -
NPR's Noel King checks in with John J. Lennon, an inmate at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, about the impact COVID-19 has had on prison life six months into the pandemic. -
Laila Lalami's new book is Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America. She says conditional citizens — of which she's one — are people sometimes embraced by America, other times rejected. -
The narrator's name in the novel is also Ayad Akhtar, and the book reads like memoir. Akhtar says he had to "pilfer" from his own life to write a novel that had the "addictive thrill" of reality TV.
