On Air: A Life at NPR with Melissa Block

Melissa Block Headshot

Melissa Block, retired NPR Host

Wednesday, October 2, 2024 ¦ 6:30 PM ¦ Alaska Center for the Performing Arts - Discovery Theater

For decades, NPR’s Melissa Block was a familiar presence in listeners’ homes, cars, and earbuds. As a correspondent and longtime host of All Things Considered, she traveled around the country and the world, bringing stories of triumph, tragedy, and much-needed humor. She joins us in Anchorage to unspool memorable moments from a lifetime of reporting, and to press the case for supporting robust journalism.

 

About Melissa Block 

Melissa Block, longtime NPR host and correspondent, is celebrated for her decades of warm yet incisive reporting. Her work over the decades earned her journalism's highest honors, and made her one of NPR's most familiar and beloved voices. As an NPR special correspondent from 2015-23, Block reported on a wide range of issues: from LGBTQ rights to the Big Lie; from guns and suicide to opioid addiction.

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, D.C., with her husband, writer Stefan Fatsis. In good weather, you'll likely find her out looking for songbirds or sweet-talking the native plants in her perennial gardens.

As host of All Things Considered from 2003 to 2015, her work took her around the country and the world, 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.

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.