Soledad O'Brien (b. September 19, 1966) is an American television journalist. She is an anchor of American Morning, the marquee morning newscast on the North American CNN television service. Her common surname with her co-anchor Miles O'Brien is a coincidence.

Her father is an Australian of Irish descent and her mother is Afro-Cuban. Her parents met at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland in 1958. When they married the next year, interracial marriage was illegal in Maryland -- as it was in all southern states until the United States Supreme Court decided in Loving v. Virginia (1967) that interracial marriage bans were unconstitutional -- so they married in Washington, DC and moved to St. James, New York, where Soledad was born. She grew up in another Long Island town, Smithtown, New York.

O'Brien began anchoring CNN's flagship morning program from New York City in July 2003, when she joined the network.

O'Brien came to CNN from NBC News. where she had anchored Weekend Today since July 1999. During that time, she contributed reports for the weekday Today Show and for weekend editions of NBC Nightly News, and covered such notable stories as John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash and the 1990s school shootings in Colorado and Oregon. In 2003, she covered the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and later anchored NBC's weekend coverage of the War in Iraq.

Before Weekend Today, O'Brien anchored MSNBC's weekend morning show and the cable network's award-winning technology program The Site, which aired weeknights from the Spring of1996 to November, 1997. One well-remembered feature of The Site was a nightly five-minute segment in which O'Brien engaged in spontaneous tech talk with a virtual reality cartoon character, Dev Null, animated in real time on Silicon Graphics computers. The character was created by technology broadcaster Leo Laporte who did the voice and actions while wearing a motion capture suit. When O'Brien sat at an espresso bar to read email from viewers, Dev Null flirted with her while answering her computer questions. She recalled, "One of the reasons that segment of the show worked is that I could not see him as I was talking to him, and the segment was unscripted. He was funny, and his jokes were not gags."

O'Brien joined NBC News in 1991, and was based in New York as a field producer for the Nightly News and Today. Before working at NBC, O'Brien served three years as a local reporter and bureau chief for San Francisco NBC affiliate KRON. She began her career as an associate producer and news writer at WBZ-TV, then the NBC affiliate in Boston.

O'Brien's work has been honored several times, including a local Emmy for her work co-hosting the Discovery Channel's The Know Zone. She has been named to People's 50 Most Beautiful in 2001 and to People en Espanol's 50 Most Beautiful in 2004. She was named to Irish American Magazine's "Top 100 Irish Americans" on two occasions. She is also on Black Enterprise magazine's 2005 Hit List.

She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She serves on the board of directors of The Harlem School for the Arts.

She is a graduate of Harvard University, with a degree in English language and American literature.

O'Brien is married to Brad Raymond, an investment banker, and has two daughters, Sofia (born 2000) and Cecilia (born 2002), and twin sons, Charlie and Jackson (born 2004).

Credit: en.wikipedia.org