Anita Powell

Anita Powell is Voice of America’s White House correspondent. She comes to that beat after a long tour as VOA’s Southern Africa correspondent, where she covered 15 African countries, out of Johannesburg. Before officially joining VOA, Powell worked as a freelance journalist for the news agency, as well as other news outlets such as the Associated Press, The New York Times, Al Jazeera and The Root, covering numerous topics and events on the African continent, including the death of Nelson Mandela. She has extensively covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and several other global hotspots and has reported from Pakistan, Ethiopia, Congo, Ukraine, South Africa, Zimbabwe and a number of other countries. In 2020, she was part of a team that received USAGM’s top journalism award, for their coverage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Powell began her career in journalism as a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, in Texas. She is a proud graduate of the University of Texas at Austin’s Plan II Honors Program and a published fiction writer.