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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NPR's Melissa Block reflects on the results of an annual survey about what most scares Americans. The nation's health care system, pollution and another world war rank in the top 10. -
The author's books are set in the poor, black Mississippi community where she grew up, a place where, she says, "the past bears very heavily on the present." -
Murad Rahimov got to see the inner workings of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center after an NPR listener learned of his passion for space. -
Meyers Chuck is off the grid, with no roads or cars; just a sprinkling of houses on the water, and a post office that's the social hub of town. -
Klukwan is home to about 100 people, most of them from the Tlingit tribe. Once their land reached to the mountains. Today, the village is struggling to retain its land and its culture. -
Gerda Saunders was a university professor when she learned she had early-onset dementia. Now, she's struggling to define herself anew as her defining characteristic — her intellect — begins to fail.
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In southeast Alaska, the commercial king salmon fishing season has been shut down a month early, because the number of wild salmon returning to rivers to spawn is at an all-time low. -
In most of the Inside Passage, there are no roads connecting the communities, so Alaskans depend heavily on ferries: the Alaska Marine Highway System. -
Politics in Haines, Alaska — population 2,500 — has grown intensely bitter lately, reflecting the volume and heat of national politics. -
Timber used to be the economic engine of Ketchikan, Alaska, but after the pulp mill there closed in the '90s, the town turned to tourism.
