María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien (born September 19, 1966) is an American broadcast journalist and executive producer. Since 2016, O'Brien has been the host for Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien, a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television. She is chairwoman of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company and distributor that she founded in 2013. She is also a member of the Peabody Awards board of directors, which is presented by the University of Georgia's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. O'Brien co-anchored CNN's American Morning from 2003 to 2007, and was the anchor of CNN's morning news program Starting Point from 2012 to 2013. In 2013, O'Brien became special correspondent on the Al Jazeera America news program America Tonight, and is also a correspondent on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Early life and education O'Brien was born and raised in St. James, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island to Edward Ephrem O'Brien (d. 2019), a mechanical engineering professor at Stony Brook University, and Estela O'Brien (née Marquetti y Mendieta) (d. 2019), a French and English teacher at Smithtown High School West. Her parents were both immigrants and met while they were students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father is from Toowoomba, Queensland, in Australia and is of three quarters Irish and one quarter Scottish descent. O'Brien's mother is from Havana, Cuba, and is of Afro-Cuban descent. When she was 14 years old, she came to the United States, sponsored by Oblate Sisters of Providence of Maryland. Interracial marriage was illegal in Maryland before 1967, so in 1958 O'Brien's parents married in Washington, D.C., where marriage laws were less restrictive. The newly wedded O'Briens then moved to Long Island, to the town of St. James. O'Brien is the fifth of six children, all graduates of Harvard College. Her siblings are law professor Maria Hylton (born 1960), GE corporate lawyer Cecilia Vega (born 1961), businessman Tony O'Brien (born 1962), who heads a documents company, eye surgeon Estela Ogiste (born 1964), and anesthesiologist Orestes O'Brien (born 1967). O'Brien graduated from Smithtown High School East in 1984. She attended Radcliffe College from 1984 to 1988, starting as pre-med and English and American literature, but left to take a job at WBZ-TV. O'Brien went back to school while pregnant with her first child and received her degree from