Cokie Roberts
2018 Presidential Sites Summit Speaker
Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News and NPR. In her more than fifty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting. In addition to her reporting, Roberts has written six New York Times bestsellers, most dealing with the roles of women in U.S. history.
In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by Universal U Click. The Roberts also wrote two books together: Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families, published in 2011 and From this Day Forward, an account of their now more than fifty year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list, following Cokie Roberts’s number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, an account of American women’s roles and relationships over time.
Roberts’s other history books recounting the untold and remarkable contributions of women to the country’s founding and its preservation: Founding Mothers, published in 2004, Ladies of Liberty in 2008, and Capital Dames in 2015, about women and Washington in the Civil War—all also rated as New York Times bestsellers, along with her children’s book Founding Mothers, illustrated by Caldecott award winner Diane Goode. The children’s version of Ladies of Liberty, also illustrated by Goode, was published in 2016.
Cokie Roberts holds more than thirty honorary degrees and serves on the boards of several non-profit institutions. President Bush appointed her to his Commission on Service and Civic Participation. In 2008 the Library of Congress named her a “Living Legend,” one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor. She is the mother of two and grandmother of six.