Keith Woods

Keith Woods is chief diversity officer at NPR. He leads NPR’s team that works with journalists in the NPR newsroom and those at more than 260 member stations across the country, training them in leadership, storytelling, editing, diversity, audio engineering and digital strategy.

Woods went to NPR in 2010 to lead the organization’s corporate diversity strategy and has visited more than 30 member stations, from New England to Alaska.

Before joining NPR, he was The Poynter Institute’s dean of faculty. Besides leading a dynamic faculty, he taught for 15 years in courses from reporting on race relations, to diversity, ethics and newspaper writing. Woods was editor for four years of the Best Newspaper Writing series, an anthology of award-winning newspaper stories. He created and continues to lead the online group seminar “Write Your Heart Out,” a four-week workshop on writing personal essays. He has also been on the faculty of Poynter’s Diverse Voices seminar on opinion-writing since its debut in 2017. He is co-author of “The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity.”

Woods has worked to help professionals, faculty and students better understand and handle matters of diversity through workshops at dozens of journalism schools and training at major radio stations, newspapers and television stations across the country. While at Poynter, he chaired two Pulitzer Prize juries.

He is a native of New Orleans and a graduate of Dillard University and the Tulane University Graduate School of Social Work. He is a former sports writer, news reporter, city editor, editorial writer, and columnist, working his way through those jobs in 16 years at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.