Susan Stamberg
Nationally renowned broadcast journalist Susan Stamberg is a special correspondent for NPR.
Stamberg is the first woman to anchor a national nightly news program, and has won every major award in broadcasting. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame. An NPR "founding mother," Stamberg has been on staff since the network began in 1971.
Beginning in 1972, Stamberg served as co-host of NPR's award-winning newsmagazine All Things Considered for 14 years. She then hosted Weekend Edition Sunday, and now reports on cultural issues for Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Saturday.
One of the most popular broadcasters in public radio, Stamberg is well known for her conversational style, intelligence, and knack for finding an interesting story. Her interviewing has been called "fresh," "friendly, down-to-earth," and (by novelist E.L. Doctorow) "the closest thing to an enlightened humanist on the radio." Her thousands of interviews include conversations with Laura Bush, Billy Crystal, Rosa Parks, Dave Brubeck, and Luciano Pavarotti.
Prior to joining NPR, she served as producer, program director, and general manager of NPR Member Station WAMU-FM/Washington, DC. Stamberg is the author of two books, and co-editor of a third. Talk: NPR's Susan Stamberg Considers All Things, chronicles her two decades with NPR. Her first book, Every Night at Five: Susan Stamberg's All Things Considered Book, was published in 1982 by Pantheon. Stamberg also co-edited The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road, published in 1992 by W. W. Norton. That collection grew out of a series of stories Stamberg commissioned for Weekend Edition Sunday.
In addition to her Hall of Fame inductions, other recognitions include the Armstrong and duPont Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Ohio State University's Golden Anniversary Director's Award, and the Distinguished Broadcaster Award from the American Women in Radio and Television.
A native of New York City, Stamberg earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College, and has been awarded numerous honorary degrees including a Doctor of Humane Letters from Dartmouth College. She is a Fellow of Silliman College, Yale University, and has served on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award Foundation and the National Arts Journalism Program based at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stamberg has hosted a number of series on PBS, moderated three Fred Rogers television specials for adults, served as commentator, guest or co-host on various commercial TV programs, and appeared as a narrator in performance with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra. Her voice appeared on Broadway in the Wendy Wasserstein play An American Daughter.
Her late husband Louis Stamberg had his career with the State Department's agency for international development. Her son, Josh Stamberg, an actor, appears in various television series, films, and plays.
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Washington's National Mall will regain a star attraction Friday, when the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History reopens after a two-year renovation. It took $85 million and a horde of curators, builders, architects and advisers to reframe space for the museum's 3 million historic objects.
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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art bids farewell today to its longtime director, Philippe de Montebello, by opening an exhibition of carefully culled objects acquired during his 31-year tenure. -
Though fierce political opponents, John McCain and Barack Obama agree on a literary matter: Each picks Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, featuring the stoic freedom-fighter Robert Jordan, as a favorite.
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Robert Wagner has made movies with Spencer Tracy and played Number Two in the Austin Powers films. In the memoir Pieces of My Heart, Wagner details two winding paths: his career and his love life.
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Alexander Calder is famous for large public art and delicate mobiles. But he also created deceptively simple and elegant jewelry that, for the first time, is the focus of an exhibition. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is its initial stop on an international tour.
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What better way to spend a summer afternoon than curled up with a good book? NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg asks three independent booksellers for their picks for lazy days and warm nights.
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The daughter of famed jazz journalist and producer Leonard Feather first tried to make a career as a stage actress. That's when she started to translate her minor aggravations into song lyrics — and singing them.
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American citizens have written to the first ladies of the nation since the days of Martha Washington. The letters make requests, ask for favors, criticize and praise. A number of letters to presidents' wives have been collected in the new book Dear First Lady.
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The party that will lead Pakistan's new government will announce its nominee for prime minister later on Saturday. Whoever is named will be confirmed by a vote in the National Assembly scheduled for Monday.
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Said real-life actress Celeste Holm about fictional actress Eve Harrington: "She had the manners of an ambassador and the morals of a pirate." All About Eve's antiheroine is all sweet-talking ambition, Mother Eve as ruthless ingenue.
