Kelly Jean Kelly

I’m a multi-media journalist with a secret superpower as an editor. Seriously. I'm like an engineer for writers. I make pieces stand up.

In my career I've been lucky enough to cover the 2008 presidential campaigns; create video scripts about each of the U.S. presidents and characterize them with a single word (Zachary Taylor: Brief); host live radio shows about East Africa and South Asia; teach Logic and Rhetoric to undergraduates; and help many professionals figure out what they want to say and how they want to say it. 

Most recently I launched the Hilton Head bureau for the The Post and Courier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper based in Charleston, South Carolina. As an enterprise reporter, I wrote front page news and features about the island and managed a team of reporters. In 2023 I won a South Carolina Press Association award for my story about the scramble to buy the household items of a man convicted of killing his wife and son, Murdaugh auction plays to a packed house: 'This is where Voldemort slept.'
Before that, I lived in Washington, DC and worked as an international broadcaster for Voice of America.

And before that, I lived in New York, Bangkok, and San Francisco and did a lot of freelance writing and editing.

All throughout, I’ve led workshops for underrepresented experts on entering the public conversation and being heard.

​I have an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia and a BA in African Studies from Yale.