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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NPR's Noel King speaks with Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers about the violence in Kenosha and how he hopes to address it, given that he lacks the support of the Republican-held state legislature. -
NPR's Noel King speaks with Matt Desmond, founder of Princeton's Eviction Lab, about the threat of a rising number of evictions nationwide as federal evictions relief draws to an end. -
Coronavirus testing in the U.S. has not kept up with demand. NPR's Noel King talks to Raymond Embry, who runs one of the largest coronavirus testing sites in Arizona, about why that is. -
The Emmy-winning actress is the executive producer of Disclosure, a new documentary on trans representation in Hollywood. Trans people were on film as early as 1914, but often misrepresented. -
Roberta Schwartz, chief innovation officer at Houston Methodist Hospital, describes how the hospital is dealing with the current influx of COVID-19 cases. -
Comedian Patton Oswalt helped finish his late wife Michelle McNamara's true-crime book about the Golden State Killer, I'll Be Gone in the Dark. Now, it's being adapted into a six-part series for HBO. -
In a new book, economist William Darity Jr. argues that monetary payments are owed directly to the descendants of enslaved people, to help reverse more than two centuries of disenfranchisement.
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What does it mean to be anti-racist, and how should adults talk to kids about race and racism? Children's author Renée Watson and anti-racism scholar Ibram X. Kendi suggest starting with books.
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George Floyd's death isn't just a story about a black man and the white cop charged with his murder. Among Asian Americans, the involvement of Hmong officer Tou Thao is stirring a racial debate. -
Minnesota state Rep. Ruth Richardson doesn't want her teenage son, Shawn, a track athlete, to go running outside. "You can't do the same things that your white friends do," she remembers telling him.
