Laura Sullivan
Correspondent, National Desk
Laura Sullivan has been on NPR's National Desk since December of 2004. During her tenure, she's covered crime and punishment issues for Morning Edition, All Things Considered and other NPR programs.
Sullivan's work has won many of journalism's highest honors. Her 2008 series, 36 Years of Solitary: Murder, Death and Justice on Angola, won a Peabody, the Investigative Reporters and Editors and Robert F. Kennedy awards for investigative reporting. Sullivan's 2007 news series investigating sexual assault of Native American women received several honors, including an Alfred I. DuPont, as well as the DART Award for outstanding reporting, an Edward R. Murrow and her second Gracie. The first was for her 2006 news series "Life in Solitary Confinement," which also won the 2007 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize.
Before coming to NPR, Sullivan was a Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, where she covered the Justice Department, the FBI and terrorism. In 1996, Sullivan and two other Northwestern University students completed a project that freed four men, including two death-row inmates, who had been wrongfully convicted of an 18-year-old murder on the south side of Chicago. The case led to a review of Illinois' death row and a moratorium on capitol punishment in the state, and received several awards.
Outside of her career as a reporter, Sullivan once spent a summer gutting fish in Alaska, and another summer cutting trails outside Yosemite National Park. She says these experiences gave her "a sense of adventure" that comes through in her reporting. Sullivan, who was born and raised in San Francisco, loves traveling the country to report radio stories that "come to life in a way that was never possible in print."
Sullivan lives with her husband, journalist Del Quentin Wilber, and their son in Washington, D.C.
