While I do report and write for a living, this is my personal blog. It serves as a cyber-scratchpad for my extracurricular obsessions, adventures and observations. I’ve been posting here at HeyElise since I left my Blogger home in 2009.
I’m Elise Hu. A political junkie since I was just a lowercase E, I covered the races and faces of Texas politics before joining NPR in 2011.
I’m currently based at NPR West in Los Angeles (well, technically Culver City) after a few years as an international correspondent for NPR, based in Seoul and covering both Koreas and Japan. Ever scattered, I also told stories from other parts of the Asian continent. You can hear me on NPR’s national news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
Previously, I was a founding journalist at The Texas Tribune, where I led multimedia efforts, television partnerships and experimented with new story forms but also covered state government and politics for the Tribune and its partners at The New York Times.
A former television reporter, I worked from 2006-2009 at KVUE-TV in Austin and served Belo Corp-owned sister stations, KENS-TV (SA), KHOU-TV (Houston) and WFAA-TV (Dallas), where I was a regular contributor to its Sunday morning politics program.
My work background includes time outside of Texas, too. I followed the political animals of South Carolina and their wild ways, covered the hurly-burly 2002 US Senate race between Jim Talent and Jean Carnahan in Missouri (Talent won) and spent much of my 5th grade year studying in great detail the presidential primary bid of once and future California Governor Jerry Brown.
I prefer prose over poetry, hobbies over habits and mayo over mustard. I love salmon nigiri, long chats with my mom and the time of year when the sun stays out real late.
Previously in my never-dull, very random existence (and not in this order) I… lived with an Asian boy band (resulting in a lot of karaoke), worked as a teen model, lifted a lot of monstrous gear to earn a journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, consumed thousands of hot dogs, spent the strangest two years of my life in Spartanburg, South Carolina (where I actually covered a man-on-dog rape), got my homes and cars burglarized a combined four five times, followed my jet-setting mom and dad on travels around the globe, interviewed Barack Obama in a bathroom, and in 2001, I started blogging when they were called “web journals”. That proved to be a good decision.