Lynn Neary is a correspondent and a frequent guest host on NPR’s newsmagazines and its talk show, Talk of the Nation. Her public radio career began at NPR Member station WOSU in Columbus Ohio, where she served as a news anchor and reporter covering education and county government. In 1982 she became a newscaster on Morning Edition, before becoming weekend host of All Things Considered from 1984 to 1992.
Lynn joined NPR’s Cultural Desk in 1993. She developed NPR’s first religion beat, helping to shape and define NPR’s coverage of this important part of America’s cultural landscape. As religion correspondent, she shared in NPR’s 1994-95 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton Award for reporting on welfare reform. Her reports were included in NPR’s coverage of the “104th Congress: The Changing of the Guard: The Republican Revolution.” She also won a 1999 Gabriel Award for her report on a program for prisoners in New York’s Sing Sing prison.
In 1991, Neary reported for “A Primer on Breast Cancer,” an American Public Radio documentary that won a 1992 Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Award, an Ohio State Award, and an Association of Women in Radio and Television Award. Neary and producer Dan Morris also received a 1988 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for “625 K Street,” a report on what had been labeled the worst public housing in the District of Columbia. The piece introduced listeners to the realities of life in the Arthur Kapper Housing Project, the scene of at least two drug-related murders.
A native New Yorker, Lynn earned a B.A. in English at Fordham University.