Mike Kelly has been a journalist for more than three decades. He is the author of two books as well as numerous prize-winning newspaper projects and columns for The Bergen Record, a daily newspaper in northern New Jersey.
His assignments have taken him to Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel (including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), and Iraq. He has covered the 9/11 attacks and the clean-up of Ground Zero, the “Good Friday Peace Accords” in Belfast, the Iraq War in which he followed a National Guard unit from training to the combat zone, Hurricane Katrina (in New Orleans), the impeachment of President Clinton, and the 9/11 Commission hearings in Washington, D.C.
Since the 9/11 attacks, he has devoted much of his time to covering terrorism, from Ground Zero to Washington, D.C. (with the 9-11 Commission) to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (to write about the terrorist detention prisons) and to Malaysia. In traveling to Malaysia, Kelly traced the recycling journey of a single steel beam from the World Trade Center. He then tracked down the people on the trade center floor supported by that steel beam and traced how they were rebuilding their lives. While in Malaysia, he also found the apartment where the 9-11 plot was first planned. Later, in New Jersey, he found the tiny motel room where two of the hijackers at that Malaysia meeting ended up staying before carrying out the plot. In 2011, for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Kelly found the survivors form the 70th floor that he had profiled a decade earlier and updated their lives.
Kelly was named the top columnist in America in 2004 and in 2011 by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. In 2001, the New Jersey Press Association named him “Journalist of the Year” for his reporting from the Middle East and from Ground Zero. Other major honors include New York Deadline Club prize for column writing, the Meyer Berger Award from Columbia University, and a national Clarion Award for feature writing. He was also among 25 New York area journalists singled out by the New York City Fire Department for a special honor for his coverage from the site of the World Trade Center.
Kelly is a regular guest on television as well as numerous radio programs. He has appeared on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" as a guest commentator and was a guest host for the WNYC radio show, “On The Line.” He has also been featured on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” on the “CBS Evening News,” and on the award-winning PBS program, “Bill Moyers Journal.”
Kelly’s 1995 non-fiction book about racial turmoil, "Color Lines: The Troubled Dreams of Racial Harmony In an American Town," was called "American journalism at its best" by The Washington Post and a "stunning piece of American social history" by Pulitzer-prize winning author J. Anthony Lukas.
In 2000, Camino Press of Philadelphia published a collection of his columns, "Fresh Jersey: Stories from an Altered State." Kelly graduated from Syracuse University with degrees in American studies and journalism, and is currently working on a masters degree in historical theology at Fordham University in New York. He is married and the father of two adult daughters. He lives in Teaneck, N.J.