NPR People

Patt Morrison, NPR Biography

Commentator, Morning Edition

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where her work has spanned topics from national political profiles and campaign coverage to the O.J. Simpson case, the Los Angeles riots, the Persian Gulf war, the Olympics, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Super Bowl, and Britain's royal family, including the death and funeral of the Princess of Wales.

She is a member of two Los Angeles Times reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the 1992 riots and the city's 1994 earthquake.

She is host and consulting producer of the nationally syndicated The BookShow with Patt Morrison, her weekly book review, interview, and discussion program produced by PBS station KCET, the leading PBS station for southern and central California.

Her best-selling book, Rio LA, Tales from the Los Angeles River, a lively account of the City of Angels and its part-time river, was published in 2001, with critical praise from Joan Didion and Ray Bradbury, among others.

Morrison has won six Emmys and four Golden Mike awards as founding host and commentator on Life & Times Tonight, the nightly news and current affairs program on KCET.

Her television interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Francis Crick, and Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frank Gehry, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard, Gore Vidal, P.D. James, Alice Walker, Walter Mosley, Neil Simon and Gordon Parks, and Kenneth Branagh, Ang Lee, Jodie Foster, Lauren Bacall, Jack Lemmon, Derek Jacobi, and Ralph Fiennes.

She appeared in a cameo as a television news interviewer in Philippe Mora's feature film Snide and Prejudice, starring Angus MacFayden and Rene Auberjonois. It premiered to laudatory reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, and was named by LA Weekly senior critic F.X. Feeney as one of the ten best films of 2001.