Poggioli retiring from NPR after 41 years

Imagining NPR with out Sylvia Poggioli veers towards the not possible. However after 41 years, Sylvia says, “It’s time to hold up my headphones.”

She is the longest-serving reporter on the Worldwide Desk and an NPR icon. For a lot of, her identify is synonymous with NPR.

Sylvia’s wide-ranging, typically hard-hitting and all the time wealthy storytelling helped NPR distinguish itself in its early years as a information group with deep curiosity within the wider world. Her work helped construct the inspiration for what’s right this moment NPR’s award-winning Worldwide Desk.

Her lilting, Italian-accented signoff is well known and beloved by listeners. And her star energy excites world leaders.

In Belgrade in 2010, reporters have been crowded round then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who was within the Balkans urging dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia. She was holding courtroom at an off-the-record debrief in a lodge bar. Sylvia, who was on project in Belgrade, went alongside to the backgrounder with Michele Kelemen, who was touring with Clinton. As Michele began to introduce Sylvia, Clinton stood up in pleasure saying, “You’re Sylvia Poggioli!!” She was thrilled to fulfill somebody she had listened to for years — a key voice within the protection of the Balkans.

Sylvia’s base has been Rome, however her reporting has taken her all over the world – from masking the turbulent civil struggle within the former Yugoslavia, to Norway to cowl the aftermath of the brutal assaults by a right-wing extremist; to Greece, Spain, and Portugal reporting on the Eurozone disaster. She has traveled with Pope Francis to Cuba, america, Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. These are however a few of the locations she’s gone.

Over her profession, Sylvia has been honored by many awards, together with a George Foster Peabody Award, Nationwide Ladies’s Political Caucus/Radcliffe Faculty Distinctive Benefit Media Awards, the Edward Weintal Journalism Prize, and the Silver Angel Excellence within the Media Award. Poggioli was a part of the NPR crew that gained the 2000 Abroad Press Membership Award for protection of the struggle in Kosovo. In 2009, she obtained the Maria Grazia Cutuli Award for international reporting.

Earlier than she leaves NPR on the finish of the month, she shall be becoming a member of Scott Simon on Weekend Version on March 25 for a farewell interview. Amongst her post-NPR plans are to work on a biography of her father, Renato Poggioli, an Italian educational and anti-fascist who was pressured to flee Italy underneath Mussolini. Sylvia was born in Windfall, Rhode Island, however moved to Italy after faculty underneath a Fulbright Scholarship.