Angela Stribling, the former BET host, jazz vocalist, and longtime Washington, D.C., radio personality, has died. Loved ones announced the news on Sunday, September 27, 2026.
Radio Facts Media, citing a statement from her husband, Ken Washington, Ph.D., reports she died peacefully at home at age 58 after a two-year battle with brain cancer. Other outlets say the cause was not made public. Stribling co-hosted BET's Screen Scene, hosted Jazz Central with Ramsey Lewis and Lou Rawls, and led Pillow Talk with Angela on WHUR 96.3 FM. She was also a classically trained jazz singer who performed internationally.
Before the Cameras and Microphones, There Was a Four-Year-Old in Buffalo Who Simply Loved to Sing
Long before anyone in Washington, D.C., knew her voice, Angela Stribling was a little girl in Buffalo, New York, who loved to sing. According to biographical details published by WHUR, she discovered that love when she was just four years old. It sounds like a small detail until you see everything that grew out of it.
Buffalo is where she was born and raised, and it's where that early spark turned into something serious. She didn't sing for fun and left it at that. She trained as a classical vocalist, and that training gave her the control and discipline that later made her sound so relaxed on the air and on stage. Classical music doesn't always lead to jazz, but in her case the two seemed to fit. Jazz gave her room to bend a phrase and take her time with a lyric, and she carried that patience into everything else she did, whether she was singing or just talking to a listener at midnight.
That's worth pausing on, because people who only knew her from television or radio may not have realized how deep the music ran. To a lot of viewers she was the friendly face introducing a video segment. To a lot of listeners she was the warm voice easing a city into the night. But the singer came first. The hosting, the voiceover work, and the acting all sat on a foundation she had been building since childhood.
Not much has been shared publicly about her family life growing up, and it wouldn't be right to guess. What we do know is that the girl from Buffalo eventually made the Washington, D.C. area her career home and became one of its most recognizable voices.
One Voice, Three Stages: How a Jazz Singer Ended Up Hosting Black Television's Entertainment News and Washington's Late-Night Radio
Her career is hard to sum up in a sentence, mostly because she kept adding to it. She worked in television, radio, and music, and she moved between them so easily that many fans probably thought of her as belonging to whichever one they knew best.
Her national profile came through Black Entertainment Television. She first auditioned as a relief host for Video Soul, and she ended up filling in for Donnie Simpson, one of the network's best-known faces. Stepping into a chair that viewers already love can't be easy. She was later moved up to co-host Screen Scene, BET's entertainment news program, and she stayed with it for about four years. In that time she became one of the network's early on-air personalities, during a period when BET was helping shape how Black entertainment was presented to a national audience.
Then there was the jazz side of her BET work. She hosted Jazz Central alongside Ramsey Lewis and Lou Rawls, two towering names in the genre. She also appeared on BET Jazz Discovery, which puts emerging artists in front of viewers, and BET Jazz Scene, a nationally broadcast newsmagazine for the jazz world. For a trained jazz vocalist, it's easy to imagine how meaningful that must have been, getting to talk about the music she loved on a national stage.
Radio was where many people in D.C. felt closest to her. At WHUR 96.3 FM, she hosted Pillow Talk with Angela and was part of the station's Quiet Storm tradition, the late-night programming of smooth, slow, romantic music that WHUR is famous for. It's a format built on mood and intimacy, and it depends on a host who sounds like they're talking to just one person. That was her gift. Her voice was also used for station imaging at WBLS in New York and on SiriusXM's Watercolors, so her reach went well beyond the capital.
And she never stopped singing. She recorded albums, performed internationally, and shared stages with artists like Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan. She also worked as a voiceover artist and an actor, and her longtime friend and former BET colleague Ed Gordon has noted that her career included movie roles. Broadcasting, singing, acting, and voice work: any one of those could have been a full career. She built all of them and did it with a warmth people remember.
At Home, With Her Husband and Her Sister Beside Her: The Quiet Final Chapter of a Life Spent Speaking to Millions
There's something moving about how her story ended. A woman whose voice reached so many people spent her final moments in a quiet room at home, surrounded by family. According to Radio Facts Media, which cited a statement from her husband, Ken Washington, Ph.D., she died peacefully at home on Saturday, September 26, 2026, at the age of 58. The outlet reports that she had been living with brain cancer for two years. Her sister Darlene and Darlene's husband were with her. Not every outlet has confirmed the cause of death, so it's fair to treat that detail with some care until the family or WHUR says more.
Very little has been shared publicly about those two years, and that's how it should be. Illness is private, and the people closest to her get to decide what the rest of us know. What comes through in the reports is simply that she wasn't alone and that the people around her clearly loved her.
A celebration of life is expected to be held in Washington, D.C. When WHUR published its statement on September 27, details had not yet been announced. For the listeners, colleagues, and friends who want to say goodbye in person, that gathering will likely matter a great deal.
Angela Stribling Passes Away at 58, Leaving Behind a Legacy at BET, WHUR, and in the World of Jazz
Word of her death spread on Sunday, September 27, when loved ones shared the news on social media. Tributes followed quickly from people who had worked with her, sung with her, or simply grown up with her voice on the radio.
Ed Gordon, the veteran journalist who worked with her at BET, was among the first to speak. He wrote that they became friends during their years at the network and stayed close after both moved on to other things. He also noted that it had already been a painful year for the BET family, with a number of losses, and that hearing about Angela made it heavier. Singer Kia Bennett, who worked with her at BET, WHUR, and XM Satellite Radio, called her a true inspiration in radio, television, and voiceover work and said it was an honor to sing backgrounds for her.
Those two tributes say a lot. One comes from a journalist who valued her as a friend, the other from a fellow singer who valued her as an artist. Together they show how many circles she touched and that people respected her as much as they enjoyed her.
She is survived by her husband, Ken, along with her family and a wide circle of friends and fans. For a lot of people in Washington, she was part of the background of their lives, the voice on the radio during a late drive home or a quiet evening. That kind of presence is hard to measure, but you notice it when it's gone.
She spent her career making people feel comfortable, whether she was introducing a jazz legend, talking through a late-night playlist, or singing a standard. Her voice, the one that started out in Buffalo when she was four, is still there in the recordings and the memories of the people who heard her. That's a good thing to leave behind.