Soledad O' Brien: Irish Afro-Cuban Journalist Extraordinaire

       Maria de la Soledad Teresa O' Brien was born in St. James, New York to Edward O' Brien, an Irish mechanical engineering professor, and Estella O' Brien, an Afro-Cuban French and English teacher. The fifth of six children, she attended Harvard University from 1984-1988 but did not obtain her degree until 2000. She began her news career as an associate producer and news writer at WBZ-TV, an NBC affiliate in Boston. In 1991, she joined NBC news as a field producer for Nightly News and the Today Show. She continued to work on various programs for NBC until 2003 when she moved to CNN. After co-anchoring American Morning with Miles O' Brien, she began creating her In America documentary series which includes five installments of Black In America and most recently, Latino In America.

        On March 29, 2013 she left CNN to start the Starfish Media Group production company. Starfish Media Group entered an agreement with HBO to air new programs and concepts it develops, and O' Brien will be joining Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Most recently, Soledad O' Brien has become a special correspondent for Al Jazeera America and will be producing a series of documentaries for the network. She has won an Emmy for her work on The Know Zone and an NAACP President's Award. She was the journalist of the year for the National Association of Black Journalists in 2010, and is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated.

        I find that her determination to stay true to her various cultures and ethnicity make her truly unique. She refused to change her name at the beginning of her career to make it more racially ambiguous and she reports on a wide range of topics that impact the black and Latino community. No one had thought of doing a series focused solely on life in black America. The documentaries and newscasts she produces incorporate health, business, race and ethnicity, as well as social change. She also engages the viewer through her conversational style of reporting and her in-depth style of interviewing. She leaves the viewer with a complete picture of what is happening in the story. She also serves as a role model for women of color wanting to break into the broadcast journalism field. There are so few women who look like we do reaching  heights like anchoring for NBC and CNN and she was able to do it while remaining true to herself.