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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For 15 minutes each week, Phyllis Jeanne Creore spoke and sang to the servicemen and their loved ones in her NBC radio broadcast. Now 96 years old, the beloved "Canteen Girl" shares her memories — and some personal wartime letters, too. -
When he was just 10 years old, Shankar began performing in Europe and the US with his family's Indian dance troupe. But at age 18, Shankar gave up all the glitter to study with a guru who taught him the sitar. He became a master, and introduced the West to his country's music. -
An exhibition of works by American realist Edward Hopper is drawing impressive crowds at the Grand Palais. Hopper is well-known in the U.S. for his pensive, lonely portraits of people sitting together yet alone. He's less well-known in France, but the exhibit has been a surprising success. -
In 1951, Leslie Caron arrived in California a malnourished and anemic ballerina. After spending the war in occupied Paris, Tinseltown was a revelation, and she soon took it by storm, appearing with the likes of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in more than 40 films.
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Newsprint is both the medium and the message in the "Shock of the News" exhibit currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The show examines a century's worth of interaction between artists and the journals of their day. -
The Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio has been home to Edward Hopper's Morning Sun painting for more than 50 years. But if you visit Columbus, there's no guarantee you'll be able to see it; the painting spends much of its time on loan to other museums. -
Swarovski crystals and chicken wire are just two ingredients of landscape artists Xavier Perrot and Andy Cao's work. Their installations at a one-time leprosarium outside Paris and in D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks are informed by the history and space that surrounds them. -
A new exhibit in New York explores the life of Edouard Vuillard — a lesser-known, intellectual Parisian artist — and the Jewish tastemakers who supported him at the turn of the century. -
Martha Gellhorn was one of the first great female war correspondents. But her reputation as a journalist was sometimes overshadowed by her marriage to Ernest Hemingway. A new HBO film looks at the relationship between this passionate power couple. -
At Washington, D.C.'s Kreeger Museum, seniors and students are paired together to enjoy the art — and each other's company. "The goal is to make people feel better and to give them a pleasant experience in the moment. That's all there is, really," says program head Derya Samadi. -
For three decades, the Smithsonian Institution has been collecting work by African-American artists, work that is now on display at the American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibition offers a wide-ranging and colorful view of African-American life.
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Hanoi, Hue, Danang and Saigon, were city names that were stamped on the American psyche a half-century ago, when the U.S. waged war in Vietnam. The once war-torn, Southeast Asian nation has made great strides to leave its troubled past behind.
