Norris, Michele L.

Impact on the world

After starting her career as a reporter at The Washington Post and later ABC News, where she was part of the team that won an Emmy and Peabody for the network’s September 11 coverage, Norris joined NPR in 2002 and co-hosted All Things Considered, public radio’s longest-running national program, for over a decade, interviewing figures from sitting presidents to Nobel laureates; the National Association of Black Journalists named her Journalist of the Year in 2009 for her coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, during which she and Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for a series exploring race and the vote. In 2010 she launched The Race Card Project, inviting people worldwide to distill their experiences of race and identity into exactly six words; the initiative, which grew into an archive of stories from all 50 states and more than 90 countries, won a 2014 Peabody Award and became the basis for her 2024 book Our Hidden Conversations. Norris left NPR in 2015 to focus on the project, later served as a Washington Post opinion columnist from 2019 to 2024, and now leads The Bridge, an Aspen Institute program on race and identity, while serving as a senior contributing editor at MSNOW.

Life & background

Born September 7, 1961, in Hennepin County, Minnesota, Norris studied electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before earning a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota. She worked as a Washington Post staff writer from 1988 to 1993, an ABC News correspondent from 1993 to 2002, and an NPR host and correspondent from 2002 to 2015, and continues to lead The Race Card Project and The Bridge at the Aspen Institute from Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband, Broderick Johnson.

Sources

1. The Race Card Project; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; NAFSA