We're back from vacation and highlighting some folx in the area who are also leaving their respective chrysalises.

In Northampton, those emergences are musicians taking on the guise of other artists they know and love to raise money for arts education in the city. For the past 34 years, the Northampton Council for the arts has been ending summer with a locally packed blow out concert at Look Park that specifically raises money for art programs in the city’s schools. We’ll speak with organizer Steve Sanderson, as well as local artists Ian St. George and Inde, both of  whom willl be performing, about Performance 34: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, happening August 20th. 

More broadly, its in the literature that grows from not just widening one's perspective, but in being well fostered as well. The Straw Dog Writers Guild has just opened up applications for the Third Emerging Writer of Color Fellowship this past week, and we’ll chat with the Fellowship's founder, Nicole Young-Martin, and Regine Jackson, the most recent Fellow about the program, and how it broadens everyone's literary perspectives and in providing space and stipends for BIPOC women and gender expansive authors, address an oft overlooked issue for developing talent as they prepare for a virtual information session tomorrow night. 

And Mr. Universe, Hampshire College and Kainaat Studio’s Salman Hameed has just returned from convening in South Africa with a bevvy of other astronomers about the nature of science and more. We’ll hear about the International Astronomical Union, and what a giant pile of scientists have to say about Space this year.