David Greene
David Greene, an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author, hosted NPR’s Morning Edition for nearly a decade. He also hosted NPR’s popular morning news podcast, Up First, guiding listeners through turbulent elections, a world-altering pandemic and fights for social change in our country. David stepped away from Morning Edition in 2021 and co-founded a new company, Fearless Media, which is collaborating with KCRW in producing Left, Right & Center. David spent much of 2022 in Ukraine, working on several audio projects, including Ukraine Stories, a daily podcast from Fearless that Forbes Magazine called a “tour de force of narrative journalism.” David brought his own experience to the conflict in Ukraine: Before Morning Edition, he was NPR’s Moscow Bureau Chief, covering the region from Ukraine and the Baltics east to Siberia. He also took two trips across the Trans-Siberian Railway and published a best-selling book about the journeys called Midnight in Siberia, giving readers a nuanced look at Russian life under Vladimir Putin.
During the Arab Spring, David spent a month in Libya, reporting riveting stories in the most difficult of circumstances as NATO bombs fell on Tripoli. He was honored with the 2011 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize from WBUR and Boston University for his coverage. David's voice became familiar to NPR listeners from his years covering former President George W. Bush. He spent hours in NPR's booth in the basement of the West Wing and followed the president and First Lady to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Rwanda, Uruguay – and, of course, Crawford, Texas. David was also an integral part of NPR's coverage of the historic 2008 election, reporting on Hillary Clinton's campaign from start to finish, and also focusing on how racial attitudes were playing into voters' decisions. The White House Correspondents' Association took special note of his report on a speech by then-candidate Barack Obama addressing the nation's racial divide and awarded it the Association's 2008 Merriman Smith Award for deadline coverage of the presidency.
While David has interviewed countless celebrities — from Kendrick Lamar, Jimmy Buffett and Dolly Parton to Jennifer Lawrence, Matt Damon and Will Smith — he says he is even more passionate about interviewing people we have never heard of, but whose lives deserve our respect and attention. David lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rose Previte, a Michelin-starred restaurateur and David’s fellow adventurer and travel companion.
Shannon Reed
Shannon is a
frequent contributor to
The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" and "Daily Shouts" columns, as well as to
McSweeney's Internet Tendency, where her
"If People Talked to Other Professionals the Way They Talk to Teachers" was the most read piece in 2018. More recently, her work was one of the most shared pieces in 2022, and another piece went viral in 2023. For
Buzzfeed, she wrote the (in)famous piece,
"If Jane Austen Got Feedback From Some Guy in a Writing Workshop." Shannon contributes book reviews and op-eds to the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her essays have been published in
The Paris Review, Slate, Guernica, Vela, Longreads, Ozy, The Guardian, LitHub, Vulture, and The Washington Post. Her fiction appeared in
Mud River Journal, Kweli Journal and Litro Fiction, among others. Her plays have been performed or read in New York, Pittsburgh, Denver, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, and she has received support from The Heinz Foundation, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Foundation, as well as the European Studies Center at Pitt.
Shannon teaches the full cycle of the Fiction Writing track in the undergrad program at Pitt: Intro to Writing Fiction, Intermediate Fiction, Readings in Contemporary Fiction and Senior Seminar in Fiction, as well as a course on Humor Writing. She also is the Co-Director for Undergraduate Studies, working with department faculty and administration on student recruitment and retention, the program's online presence, curriculum, events and other areas of focus. She serves on the Senate Student Aid, Admissions and Student Committee.
Shannon holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Pitt, an MA in Educational Theatre/Teaching Secondary English from NYU, and a BFA in Theatre: Acting and Directing from Otterbein University. Before joining the faculty at Pitt, Shannon taught in the New York City public school system. She is at work on her third work of non-fiction, a book of essays about her disability, and her first novel, set at a fine and performing arts camp in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1997.
