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.
-
Women's colleges have changed policies for a generation that increasingly identifies as nonbinary, but Hollins University in Roanoke has not. (Story originally aired on ATC on Nov. 26, 2021.)
-
Pfizer has received emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 pill, giving doctors a new tool for treating the virus. Who qualifies to take it and is it expected to work against the omicron variant?
-
The FDA authorizes the first antiviral pill to treat COVID-19 at home. The House Jan. 6 panel wants to talk to Trump ally Rep. Jordan. Russian President Putin holds his annual year-end new conference.
-
The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol has requested that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a longtime ally of ex-President Trump, voluntarily provide information to the panel.
-
Fueling the Jan. 6 insurrection was the "Big Lie" that Donald Trump won the election. One year later, many warn that lie has metastasized and now poses an even graver threat to American democracy. -
Migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere are stranded in Belarus, still hoping for asylum in the European Union. They are living in squalid conditions near the Polish border.
-
President Biden announces more measures to make free at-home rapid tests available. Because of COVID, the NHL is pausing games. Hundreds of migrants remain trapped at the Belarus-Poland border.
-
Women's colleges have adapted admissions policies for a generation that increasingly identifies as nonbinary. Hollins University's exclusion of nonbinary applicants has raised hackles. -
The Audubon Naturalist Society is dropping the name Audubon. John James Audubon was a famous ornithologist, who was also an enslaver and a grave robber who seized the skulls of Native Americans.
-
Many children of 9/11 victims were too young to remember their parents who died. They've grown up living with the tension between having a personal connection to the day but few, if any memories.
