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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Session drummer Dave Tull has played with the likes of Chuck Mangione, Maynard Ferguson and Barbra Streisand, but he breaks out on his own with a new album, Texting and Driving.
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News"There is nothing except the canvas, the artist, his gaze, and you," says Stephanie Barron, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "That's it. The rest of the world just fades away." -
NPR's Susan Stamberg remembers flying back from India in 1968 to a city and country that was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. -
A Subway employee, a cleaning woman and a 1908 child laborer are all part of a National Portrait Gallery exhibition called "The Sweat Of Their Face." -
It's the Friday before Thanksgiving. That means it's time for NPR's Susan Stamberg's traditional recipe that "sounds terrible but tastes terrific" — though her granddaughter begs to differ. -
A new biography documents the lives and friendship of actors Henry Fonda and James Stewart.
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An exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum features art and artifacts from World War I. It includes paintings by combat artists and images of carvings found on the walls of underground quarries. -
Founded in 1855, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., grew from 250 patients to 8,000. A new exhibit at the National Building Museum explores the links between architecture and mental health. -
Armed with cotton swabs, strong solvents and a lot of training, conservators are entrusted with restoring priceless works of art. At the National Gallery of Art we learn that varnish is enemy No. 1. -
The new film Maudie is an intimate drama about self-taught Canadian painter Maud Lewis. The film also takes a deep dive into her paintings and legacy.
