Journalist Robin Roberts is the award-winning anchor of Good Morning America. Her position has given her the opportunity to interview people as diverse and influential as Patrick Swayze and Barack Obama. From 1990 through 2005, Roberts was an anchor with SportsCenter on ESPN, for which she earned three Emmy Awards and was the show’s first on-air black anchorwoman. In 2009 and 2011, she hosted the Academy Awards pre-show. She has also been an anchor and sports reporter for television stations in New Orleans; Atlanta; Nashville; Biloxi, Mississippi; and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Roberts’s passion for sports extends beyond her career in journalism. A skilled basketball player, she became one of the all-time leading scorers in Southeastern Louisiana University’s history, from where she graduated cum laude with a degree in communication. She is a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2012, inducted as a contributor for the positive impact she made on the sport. Roberts also drove the pace car for the 2010 Indianapolis 500.
Hurricane Katrina devastated Roberts’s hometown of Pass Christian, Mississippi, along with much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In the fall of 2005, Roberts delivered a series of powerful reports from the area. Roberts used her influence as a Good Morning America anchor to launch the GMA Gets It Done campaign to rebuild Pass Christian.
Roberts is the survivor of both breast cancer and myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone marrow disease. She received a bone marrow donation from her older sister Sally-Ann Roberts, the popular New Orleans anchor of Eyewitness Morning News.
She is the daughter of Lawrence E. Roberts, who was a pilot with the famed Tuskegee Airmen and a colonel in the United States Air Force. In addition to being a broadcaster, Roberts often speaks on behalf of charitable and civic functions. She lives in New York City. |