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Anthony Brooks

Anthony Brooks has more than twenty five years of experience in public radio, working as a producer, editor, reporter, and most recently, as a fill-in host for NPR. For years, Brooks has worked as a Boston-based reporter for NPR, covering regional issues across New England, including politics, criminal justice, and urban affairs. He has also covered higher education for NPR, and during the 2000 presidential election he was one of NPR's lead political reporters, covering the campaign from the early primaries through the Supreme Court's Bush V. Gore ruling. His reports have been heard for many years on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

Beyond NPR, Brooks has also worked as a senior producer on the team that helped design and launch The World for Public Radio International. He was also a senior correspondent for InsideOut Documentaries at WBUR in Boston. His piece "Testing DNA" and "The Death Penalty-InsideOut" won the 2002 Robert F. Kennedy Award for best radio feature. Over the years, Brooks has won numerous other broadcast awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Regional Broadcasters Award, the AP Broadcasters Award, the Ohio State Award, and the Robert L. Kozik Award for environmental reporting for his Soundprint documentary, "Chernobyl Revisited."

Beyond his reporting, Brooks is also a frequent fill-in host for NPR's On Point as well as Here and Now, produced by WBUR, and for NPR's Day to Day.

In 2006 Brooks was awarded a Knight Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he spent a year of sabbatical studies focusing on urban violence and wrongful convictions.

Brooks grew up in Boston, Italy, and Switzerland.

  • In the 1970s, the average heroin user was 28 to 30 years old and an urban dweller. Today, the average addict is a white, middle-class teenager. As the profile of heroin users has changed, so has the drug, which is more potent than ever. NPR's Anthony Brooks reports on the new generation of users in the first of a five-part series on this growing addiction crisis.