Grace Personified: Michele Norris Goes There | The Tough Talks That Make You Courageous

Join the Institute of Politics for a conversation with award-winning journalist Michele Norris, one of the most trusted and compelling voices in American media. A longtime NPR host and Washington Post columnist, Norris is also the creator of The Race Card Project, a groundbreaking initiative that has collected more than half a million personal stories to spark honest dialogue about race and identity. 

She will explore how narrative, history, and lived experience shape our national conversations—drawing on decades of reporting from NPR, ABC News, and major national publications.

The discussion will be moderated by Marc Adelman.

*Lunch will be served

About Michele Norris

Michele Norris is one of the most trusted voices in journalism. She is a columnist for The Washington Post opinion page 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. She later served as a special correspondent for NPR covering race and identity in America.

In 2010, Michele started The Race Card Project where she asked people around the world to share their experiences, questions, hopes, and dreams, laments, and observations about identity –in just six words–as the starting point for conversations about race.

In partnership with NPR, Michele produced a series of powerful radio segments based on Race Card Project narratives that were honored with a Peabody Award. In 2015 she left NPR to devote more time to building The Race Card Project’s vast narrative archive. The project has archived more than 500,000 stories and has been used by hundreds of schools, businesses, churches, museums, and even the justice department and the US military to foster dialogue and deep examination of how racial dynamics work in institutions. Michele is also the author of The Grace of Silence, a book that examines how hidden narratives around race can have a profound and lasting impact.

Before joining NPR, Michele worked for a decade as a television correspondent for ABC News in the Washington bureau. Prior to that, she was a staff writer for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. She has also done reporting projects for Time, National Geographic, PBS and Lifetime Television.

Norris has won Emmy and DuPont and Livingston awards for her work. She has also received a National Dialogue Award for fostering difficult conversations across political and ideological differences. She serves on the Peabody Awards board of directors.

Norris is married to Broderick Johnson. They have three children and reside in Washington, DC.