By the time Anne Garrels gets to town to pick up her Daniel Pearl Award from the L.A. Press Club in June, she will be nearly three months into her next life. A memo from the National Public Radio foreign desk says Garrels is leaving the staff to go home to Connecticut.

Fr: Loren Jenkins, Supervising Senior Editor, NPR Foreign Desk
Re: Anne Garrels to Become NPR Contributor

NPR's foreign desk would like to announce that after 23 years of groundbreaking reporting for NPR around the world, Senior Foreign Correspondent Anne Garrels has decided to hang up her spurs at the end of this month.

Hers has been one of NPR's signature on-air voices since she first joined public radio in 1988, after stints in TV for NBC and ABC News. She has served NPR with distinction as a diplomatic correspondent, a Moscow bureau chief and, for the past decade or so, as a roving correspondent covering conflicts and wars from Chechnya to Beirut, from Kabul to Baghdad, with stops in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Tiananmen Square in China among others.

Along the way, she has won virtually every important broadcasting award from Peabodys to du Ponts, Polks to Overseas Press Club awards for outstanding journalism. Now, fresh from winning this year's Los Angeles Press Club's Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism, Anne has decided that it's time to leave the battle fields that have framed so much of her distinguished reporting and spend more time peacefully working on her farm in Connecticut with her artist husband, Vint Lawrence.

Fortunately Annie plans to hang on to her mic and digital recorder for special events and occasional assignments yet to be determined in the future. While she will no longer be on staff, her voice on NPR stations will not be stilled.

She notes, "This has been the hardest decision I've ever made. I love NPR. But it's time to be with my other family."