Felipe Luciano

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News reporter and anchor, poet, writer, activist, and lecturer, Felipe Luciano is one of the most dynamic Latino public figures in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His eloquence, vision, and passion for issues of social justice are extraordinary. As a member of the Last Poets, Luciano led provocative political workshops in Harlem that attracted progressive intellectuals and activists, including leading figures of the black power movement like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

He credits his doting grandmother, who had a profoundly proud sense of her negritude, for conferring onto him a positive view of his Afro-Latino roots. 

Coming to prominence as a leader in the Young Lords Party fighting for Puerto Rican rights in East Harlem in the late 60's Luciano immersed himself in the city's Black and Latino arts movement. In 1972 he founded and produced the acclaimed radio show "Latin Roots," on WRVR FM, the first English language program in the United States to feature Latin culture and music and to develop an ethnically and racially diverse audience receiving an Ace Award. The late Frankie Crocker, legendary program director and host of WBLS FM brought Luciano on board to be his lead-in man from 12-4 p.m. Under the banner of "The Total Black Experience in Sound," WBLS ushered in the renaissance of urban radio and rocketed to the top of the New York City radio charts.

Later, Luciano took a post at WLIB, the AM sister station of Percy Sutton's WBLS, owned by the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation. There he produced "Conversations with Felipe Luciano," which explored the commonalities between black and Latino communities through dialogue. In the mid-1970s, Luciano's career evolved from radio to television when he NBC's news New York City affiliate station as a reporter and later as weekend anchor, becoming the first Puerto Rican news anchor of a major media network station in the United States.

While at WNBC-New York, Luciano won an Emmy for best reporting, a live special report (a concept which he created) on prison life at Riker's Island, where Luciano lived and reported from for five consecutive days which also won a Silurian award.

In the 1980s, Luciano anchored Channel 2 The People for CBS, a weekly local series featuring current events and interviews also won an Emmy. He was also one of the original correspondents and morning anchors of Good Day New York for Fox TV. In addition, he co-hosted and helped create the news-style, fast-paced news magazine Good Day Street Talk with Mayor Ed Koch.