Angela Stribling, the former BET host and longtime Washington, D.C. radio personality, has died after a two year battle with brain cancer. She passed away peacefully at home on Saturday, September 26.
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Her husband, Ken Washington, Ph.D., shared the news on Sunday in an Instagram post on her account and in a statement to WHUR 96.3 FM, the station where her voice was a fixture for decades. “It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved wife, Angela Marie Stribling, passed away peacefully at home on Saturday, September 26,” he wrote. He said he and her sister Darlene were by her side.
“Angela leaves behind a legacy of love, joy, kindness, inspiration, and a voice and spirit that will never be forgotten,” Washington added. Daily Voice reported she was 58, though the family did not include her age in the statement.
For a generation of viewers, Angela Stribling was one of the faces of BET. She co-hosted the entertainment show Screen Scene with Melvin Lindsey and was a pioneer of the network’s jazz programming, helping launch BET Jazz and hosting shows including Jazz Central, Jazz Discovery and Jazz Scene. She shared the Jazz Central stage with legends Ramsey Lewis and Lou Rawls.
Radio is where her voice became part of everyday life. Starting in 2014, she hosted the late night show Pillow Talk With Angela on WHUR and SiriusXM. She was also the imaging voice, meaning the voice heard on a station’s promos and on air identifications between songs, for the Quiet Storm on both WHUR and New York’s WBLS, as well as SiriusXM’s Watercolors. Radio executive Skip Dillard said he hired her as the imaging voice for WBLS’s Quiet Storm in 2009 and that her voice is still heard there today. From 2014 to 2019, she also worked as a segment host on WJLA’s Let’s Talk Live in D.C.
Before any of that, Angela Stribling was a singer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, discovered singing at age four and trained classically before falling in love with jazz as a teenager. She performed at the Blue Note in New York, recorded Tokyo Sundays with Najee, and released the single Pillow Talk, produced by Marcus Miller and featuring Will Downing and Gerald Albright. She shared stages with Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan.
Her career also crossed into film and reality TV. She played a TV anchor in the 1992 Eddie Murphy movie The Distinguished Gentleman, and in 2020 she appeared on Season 5 of The Real Housewives of Potomac. That same year, WHUR and Black Women in Radio honored her as a BWIR Influencer.
Tributes started pouring in as soon as the news broke. Veteran journalist Ed Gordon, her former BET colleague, called her a sweet soul and said her sultry voice made her a staple on radio in the D.C. area and on Sirius. He shared that during their last conversation, she told him she and her husband planned to spend more time in D.C. after living out west for several years.
Singer Kia Bennett, who worked alongside Angela Stribling at BET, WHUR and XM Satellite Radio, called her “truly an inspiration to me in the radio, tv, and voice over world” and said it was an honor to sing background for her.
In her final birthday post on October 13, 2025, Stribling hinted at what she was going through while keeping her spirit intact. “I’m grateful to God for another year of LIFE!” she wrote, adding that the past year had been the most challenging of her lifetime.
A celebration of life will be held in Washington, D.C., with the date and venue to be announced.
