Krista Tippett

Alice Dorrance Fellow for Spiritual Writing 2015

Alum 2015

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a New York Times bestselling author, and a National Humanities Medalist. She was the 2019 Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford University.

Krista grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and became a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. She then lived in Spain and England before seeking a Master of Divinity at Yale University in the mid-1990s.

Emerging from that, she saw a black hole where intelligent public conversation about the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life might be.

She pitched and piloted her idea for several years before launching Speaking of Faith—later On Being—as a weekly national public radio show in 2003. In 2014, the year after she took On Being into independent production, President Obama awarded Krista the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Krista avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.”

Krista has two grown children. She is at work on a new book, Letters to a Young Citizen. Her previous books are Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (2016, which she worked on at the Mesa Refuge during her residency); Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit (2010); and Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How To Talk About It (2007).