Morgan Radford: Now Then
NBC News anchor Morgan Radford debuts her debut novel about a Harvard student unraveling her mother's secret past, in conversation with Symone D. Sanders.
Why we picked this
A national news anchor steps into fiction — and the story she chose to tell, about hidden pasts and generational silence, is more personal than her TV career suggests.
Morgan Radford has spent years as an NBC News anchor covering breaking news and major political events. Her debut novel marks a deliberate departure — a work of literary fiction centered on a Harvard student who begins pulling at a thread in her family history, only to find that her mother’s past is more complicated, and more concealed, than she ever imagined. The novel sits at the intersection of family saga and mystery, driven by questions about what we inherit and what we are never told.
The conversation with Symone D. Sanders — a fellow veteran of political media — promises to be substantive, drawing on their shared experience as Black women navigating high-profile careers while grappling with personal and historical narratives. Sanders’s questions are likely to reach past the plot and into the territory of why Radford wrote this particular story now.
Politics and Prose hosts this free event at their Connecticut Avenue flagship, which remains one of Washington’s most reliable venues for the kind of book-and-author evening that actually moves between the personal and the political without losing either.