Ayesha Rascoe
Ayesha Rascoe is the host of Weekend Edition Sunday and the weekend host of Up First. As host of the morning news magazine show, she interviews newsmakers, entertainers, politicians and more about the stories that everyone is talking about or that everyone should be talking about.
Rascoe is also the editor of HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience, a book of essays about the impact of historically Black colleges and universities. Rascoe is an alumnae of Howard University, an HBCU in Washington, D.C.
Known for her southern roots and signature wit, Rascoe has been a mainstay on NPR's programs since joining the outlet in 2018.
Prior to her role as host, Rascoe was a White House Correspondent. She covered three presidential administrations, gaining a reputation for her sharp questioning in the White House briefing room. Rascoe's reporting included a number of high-profile foreign trips, including President Trump's 2019 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam, and President Obama's final NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland in 2016. As a part of the White House team, she was also a regular on the NPR Politics Podcast.
She's also guest hosted NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast and radio show and been a frequent guest on Pop Culture Happy Hour.
Before joining NPR, Rascoe spent the first decade of her career at Reuters, rising from a news assistant to an energy reporter to eventually covering the White House. While at Reuters, Rascoe covered some of the biggest energy and environmental stories of the past decade, including the 2010 BP oil spill and the U.S. response to the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011. She also spent a year covering energy legal issues and court cases.
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President Trump and the First Lady were whisked away from the White House Correspondents' dinner on Saturday night after a suspect fired shots in the hotel where the dinner was being held.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, about possible outcomes now that the U.S. and Israel have attacked Iran.
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U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran enter a second day as President Trump warned of increased intensity if Iran retaliates.
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The artist and Kansas City, Kan., native builds on the Afrofuturistic world from her 2018 album in a new short story collection titled "The Memory Librarian." She tells NPR about her nightmare that inspired the project. -
The employee did not have prolonged contact with people on the White House coronavirus task force, the agency says. -
The coronavirus has hit restaurants hard, but President Trump's proposal to let businesses write off meals is not the answer, critics say. Plus, Trump's own tax law eliminated the tax break. -
Federal officials are now predicting that the coronavirus could claim more than 200,000 American lives. The news brought a more somber tone to Tuesday's White House briefing on the issue.
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After two weeks of wavering on guidelines that put normal American life on hold, President Trump extended until April 30 measures aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. -
The president said the border would close by "mutual consent," the latest development in the coronavirus pandemic. -
"We want to go big," President Trump said as his administration seeks to revive the now-stalled economy.
