Pressing then-President Donald Trump on the issue of voter suppression a little more than 2½ years ago, veteran White House correspondent April Ryan was taken aback by his admonishment to “sit down.” She wouldn’t. “I kept popping up,” she recounted later, “because you're not going to tell me, a Black woman, to sit down. Nope. So, I stood up.” 

She has been doing it for nearly a quarter of a century – going back to the Clinton administration – as a member of the elite corps of journalists who cover the White House and look to hold its occupants accountable for their policies and actions. 

Ryan, the White House correspondent and Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the news network TheGrio.TV, sits down with the Library’s Kaite Stover for a public conversation about her career and experiences and the challenges facing America’s media today. From her vantage point as an African American with access to the highest office in the nation, Ryan also examines the racial sensitivities, issues, and attendant political struggles of our nation’s presidents. 

In addition to her work with TheGrio, which she joined in January, Ryan appears as a political analyst on CNN. She had been a correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, has served on the board of the White House Correspondents Association, and was the recipient of the Freedom of the Press Award Winner from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in 2019 and the Women’s Media Center’s She Persisted Award in 2017. The National Association of Black Journalists named her as its Journalist of the Year in 2017. 

Ryan also is the author of three books, with a fourth, Black Women Will Save The World, due for release early next year. 

Stover is the Library’s longtime director of Readers Services.