Who is Ira Glass?
 

Ira Glass is the host and producer of This American Life. The program premiered on WBEZ in Chicago on November 17th, 1995 and launched nationally in June of 1996.  In 1997... the program won the prestigious Peabody Award.

Glass has worked for NPR for 18 years, starting when he was 19 years old. At one point or another, he has worked on nearly every NPR network news program, and done virtually every production job in NPR's Washington headquarters. He has been a tape cutter, newscast writer, desk assistant, editor and producer. He has filled in as host of Talk of the Nation and Weekend All Things Considered. He produced the pilots and helped design the format of the late-night program Heat with John Hockenberry.

From 1989 until 1995, Ira Glass was a reporter in NPR News' Chicago Bureau. For two years, he covered Chicago school reform for NPR's All Things Considered, with two unusual series of reports. The first followed Taft High School for an entire school year. The second followed Washington Irving Elementary for a year. School restructuring at Taft went poorly; at Irving it went well.

His education reporting began in 1990, when he spent two months at Chicago's Lincoln Park High School, for a series about race relations at one urban school. He returned to Lincoln Park two years later, to see which of the sophomores he had followed so closely had graduated and which had dropped out, and why, in a second series.

His education reporting has won several awards: in 1991 from the National Education Association; in 1992 and 1994 from the Education Writers Association. In 1994 and 1995, Glass was invited to speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 1995, he was the only journalist invited to contribute to a book on education policy put out by the National Governors Association.

In 1988, Glass was named as one of a handful of "Young Journalists of the Year" by the Livingston Foundation. In 1991, he and NPR's South Africa correspondent John Matisonn were awarded by the National Association of Black Journalists, for their four-part series comparing race relations in South Africa with those in the United States.

During the 1992 Presidential Campaign, he travelled with the Clinton campaign, and in January 1993, he anchored NPR's live broadcast of the Clinton Inauguration.

From 1990 until the summer of 1995, he co-hosted a weekly, local program on WBEZ called The Wild Room, a show which defies easy description.

Glass graduated from Brown University in January 1982 with honors, in Semiotics.