Michele Norris

Michele Norris is one of the most trusted voices in journalism. As the host of the Audible Original podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen, she brings her warm yet rigorous interviewing skills to conversations that are rich and revealing. Norris is also a columnist for The Washington Post Opinions section, and her voice will be familiar to followers of public radio, where from 2002 to 2012 she was a host of National Public Radio’s afternoon magazine show All Things Considered. Norris is also the founding director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody Award-winning narrative archive where people around the world share their experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity—in just six words—as the starting point for conversations about race and belonging. Norris is also a National Geographic Storytelling Fellow.

She is the author of The Grace of Silence, and her next book, Our Hidden Conversations, will be published in January 2024 and explores race and identity in America during the period bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She has received Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont Awards for her work. In 2022, she received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.

Norris was named "Journalist of the Year" in 2009 by the National Association of Black Journalists. Before joining NPR in 2002, Michele spent almost ten years as a TV correspondent for ABC News in the Washington Bureau covering politics, policy, and the dynamics of social change. She has also worked as a staff writer for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.

Norris was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University and has served as a Sine Fellow at American University. In 2022, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is a judge for The Chancellor Awards and a board member for the Peabody Awards. She is also a board member of the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia University and the storytelling committee for the Obama Presidential Center under construction on the South Side of Chicago. Additionally, she serves on the board of the National Archives Foundation.