While growing up on Detroit’s west side, Tonya Mosley was drawn to journalism by such luminaries as local TV news anchors Bill Bonds and Carmen Harlan and multi-hyphenate sportswriter Mitch Albom. “I wanted to be Mitch Albom more than anybody because he had his own radio show; he had a column in the newspaper; he had a segment on FOX 2,” she says. “He had the freedom within his journalism to do so many things.”
Terry Gross, the legendary Fresh Air host who, in April 2023, asked Mosley to be her first official co-host, was not among her early inspirations. After discovering Gross while at the University of Missouri, however, she became “very much enthralled.”
Still, it was a long road to becoming Fresh Air’s co-host. Mosley’s first professional job was at a TV station in Saginaw in 1999. She began diversifying in 2012 as the creator and host of a four-part series on Black life for Seattle’s public radio station. By 2019, she was co-host of the NPR show Here & Now and launched her podcast, Truth Be Told…