Up at the crack of dawn. Get the kids up, fed and out the door on time, making sure they know you love them. That’s a daily routine for hundreds of Falls Church residents for most of the year, and if that isn’t enough, with all that goes with it, to constitute a full-time job, then it should be.

But that’s where things just get started for so many of us, our lives defined by the hectic pace of politics in the nation’s capital.

And so it is for one of our relatively new Falls Church residents whose name is already a household name for hundreds of thousands of Americans who hear her reporting on NPR throughout the week, across the land and all the ships at sea.

Tamara Keith moved to the Little City of Falls Church in 2015 and she can’t get enough of it. She adores her new home and neighborhood, as she told the News-Press in an exclusive interview last week. If ever there was one, she is a true believer in everything Falls Church.

“We moved to Falls Church in 2015 and feel so lucky to live here. We love our neighbors and the greater little city community,” she wrote in a follow-up response to a question.

Her family’s two kids are rising eighth and third graders “and we are big believers in FCCPS (Falls Church City Public Schools),” she wrote to us this week. The family home is near Lincoln Park, which she calls “a very frustrating total disaster” currently due to renovations. But we are confident that that is a temporary assessment.

After the kids are off to school, she heads to NPR headquarters at 1111 North Capitol St. NE in Washington, unless, of course, she is on a special assignment, such as when she traveled to China this summer for the president’s latest summit there. She is heard on NPR many days each week reporting on national affairs, and viewers may also recognize her from her regular Monday appearances as a contributor on PBS’s Politics Monday segment.

If the question is raised, as would be the case for many News-Press readers, how she came to build such a distinguished career, the answer is a story of the better side of what has made America great.

She is one of those people who seemed to know from an early age exactly what she wanted to do.

That became apparent at an early age. Her parents, both educators who wanted out of the big city, chose to move from greater Los Angeles to rural Hanford in Kings County in California’s Central Valley when she was eight.

That’s where she grew up and the availability of opportunities there, while maybe more limited than in a metropolis, were nonetheless more accessible to the kind of driven young woman she was.

In the sixth grade, when asked to write an essay on what she wanted to become, she responded, “a volcanologist” (one who studies volcanoes). But that soon changed, and before long she was writing letters to NPR journalists and anchors, asking for advice on how to grow up to do what they did.

Having been a stringer for the Fresno Bee and the Hanford Sentinel, she later became NPR’s teen essayist, contributing essays about once a month for approximately three years on a wide range of topics affecting teenage life.

She attended U.C. Berkeley, majoring in philosophy. Philosophers, she noted, offered ways to reason and think critically that were not attached to particular contemporary issues, and she liked that.

Today, she leads Swing Shift, an NPR reporting project whose stories air across a variety of NPR news programs and are also published online. The project looks for ways people can better see one another through their shared humanity. At the same time, she continues to host the NPR Politics Podcast, a role she has held for the past 11 years.

Regardless of party, she noted the system “keeps failing people,” and neither party is speaking to this concern. A key is to treat audiences with respect, she said, and to help rebuild the broken connections between institutions and the people they serve.

“People are craving authenticity,” she stated. “They don’t want to be depressed. We need to find more creative ways to reach our audiences. We are all human beings, after all.”

Reflecting her people-oriented personality, she served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from 2022 to 2023. She is optimistic about the future of Swing Shift as well as her continued work on the NPR Politics Podcast. The goal of Swing Shift is to foster greater understanding that reaches beyond differences.

“All views are valid in their own place,” she said.

Even on those mornings when getting her kids ready for school may prove particularly challenging.