Midday

Tom Hall's guest today is the acclaimed author, Louise Erdrich. She is the author of 18 novels, a collection of short stories, three collections of poetry, more than a half a dozen children's books, and two works of non-fiction. She has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award; she has also won a National Book Award, and last June, she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Night Watchman.

Ms. Erdrich is one of the most gifted and compelling writers in American literature, and readers all over the world are irresistibly drawn to the bevy of beautiful, complex and endearing characters who navigate her worlds in fascinating and unexpected ways, and whose stories are told with grace, compassion and persuasive authority.

Just last year, Louise Erdrich spoke with Tom Hall on this program about her then-newly published novel, The Night Watchman. That wonderful tale drew its inspiration from the true story of her grandfather, an activist leader of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in the 1950s.

Her new novel, published on Tuesday, takes place in contemporary Minneapolis, Minnesota, as the pandemic rages on and around the time of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. Many of its characters are employees or customers at a store inspired by Birchbark Books, a bookstore Louise Erdrich owns. The novel even includes a character who is an author named Louise...

It’s called The Sentence.

Louise Erdrich joins us on Zoom from her home outside Minneapolis.

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Is it time to bring back Baltimore's "Dollar House" program of the 1970s?

WYPR’s Aaron Henkin — the award-winning producer and host of Out of the Blocks, which ended a nine-year run a few months ago — looked into that question, submitted by listener Tracy Gosson, for a recent episode of Aaron's new podcast, The Maryland Curiosity Bureau.

Aaron joins Tom to discuss the podcast, and in a clip from the Dollar House episode, he talks with Lilly Hyman, a homeowner who bought her house through the city's popular but short-lived Dollar Homesteading Program in 1975, and with others involved with city housing issues, then and now. Their comments suggest that a new program of urban homesteading could be in store for Baltimore, a city still contending with more than 16,000 vacant homes.

You can hear brief excerpts from Aaron Henkin's new "Maryland Curiosity Bureau" podcast on Thursday mornings here on WYPR, during Morning Edition. You can drop Aaron a question of your own. What do you wonder about life in the Baltimore region? You can share your question, vote on what you want Aaron to report on next, and find the podcast on wypr.org/curiosity.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Today on Midday, a few different takes on the subject of housing.

A little later, WYPR’s Aaron Henkin, the host of WYPR's new podcast The Maryland Curiosity Bureau, will join me to talk about his reporting on the Baltimore dollar house program.Then, our theater critic, J Wynn Rousuck, will review a production of Rent, the Tony Award and Pulitzer prize-winning musical that opened on Broadway 25 years ago.

But we begin with Nneka N’namdi, an activist who is working to eliminate blighted housing in our city. The Dollar House program in the 1970s was seen as a big step forward. The Vacants to Value initiative in the administration of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake made some progress, but the number of vacant properties, about 16,000, hasn’t changed significantly over the last decade.

Nneka N’namdi describes herself as a “technoartivist,” who is applying her tech and creative skills to the cause of restoring neighborhoods that are ravaged by blight. She is the founder of the non-profit, Fight Blight BMore.

Nneka N'namdi joins us on Zoom…

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's next guest is Derecka Purnell. She is an activist and human rights lawyer with a law degree from Harvard University. She's a scholar-in-residence with Columbia University's Initiative for Social Justice, and a columnist for The Guardian. She's also the author of a new book that challenges our long-held assumptions about policing and incarceration. In fact, she argues that police departments and prisons should be abolished.

She writes, "Abolition is not the mere absence of police and prisons. It’s a paradigm, aspiration and organizing practice to make those institutions obsolete,” and she links the abolitionist movement to decolonization, disability justice, Earth justice and socialism.

The book is called Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom.

Derecka Purnell will engage in an on-line conversation about the book on Thursday night (Nov. 11) with our good friend, D Watkins. To register for the free event, which is hosted by Charm City Books, click here.

Ms. Purnell joins us now on our digital line from Washington, DC.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

President Biden was here in Baltimore two weeks ago for a CNN town hall at Baltimore Center Stage, and this afternoon, he’ll be in town again to tout the infrastructure bill that passed after months of grueling, messy internecine fights within his party. With the aid of 13 Republicans, House Democrats passed the package that the Senate had passed last August. The bill passed without the support of “The Squad,” six progressives who refused to surrender the leverage they had fought to maintain by tying the infrastructure bill to a larger package that includes climate change provisions, child and elder care, and other major programs.

The fate of that larger bill is still quite up in the air. But today, the President has chosen to return to Baltimore to talk about the bill that has passed.

This time, he’ll be at the Port of Baltimore in Dundalk. Joining Tom now to talk about what that legislation may accomplish is Kevin DeGood. He is the Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC.

Kevin DeGood joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's next guest today is a long-time advocate for police reform. Ray Kelly is the former director of the No Boundaries Coalition, which works on behalf of people in the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor in West Baltimore. Ray was a leader of the West Baltimore Commission on Police Misconduct. He also served as the chair of the Community Oversight Task Force, which was mandated by the 2017 consent decree with the Justice Department to oversee police misconduct complaints.

Ray now serves as the Executive Director of the Citizens Policing Project, and he was appointed by Mayor Brandon Scott to be on the Local Control Advisory Board, a group of about a dozen community leaders that will map the process of returning control of the Baltimore Police Department to the city. It has been largely under state control since the mid-1860s.

Ray Kelly joins us on Zoom…

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Tom's Newsmaker guest today is the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, Marilyn Mosby. A week and a half ago, she released the names of 91 current and former Baltimore City Police Officers she says can’t be trusted to testify in trials. The Baltimore Sun reports that 26 of the officers on the "Do-Not-Call" list are on active duty. Twenty-four of those officers have criminal cases that are pending in courts in Baltimore City, or in Anne Arundel or Howard counties. The list also includes officers convicted in the Gun Trace Task Force scandal who are in prison, and many who are no longer with the department.

The release of the list comes after defense attorneys sued the State’s Attorney’s office to make the names of these officers public. They contend that more than 300 officers may be compromised, and are pushing for Ms. Mosby to release more names.

The State’s Attorney’s office is also contending with a worker shortage. Three years ago, 217 prosecutors handled the city’s caseload. Now, only 164 prosecutors do.

And, in addition to managing the backlog of trials that have been delayed by COVID, the State’s Attorney’s office is working with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted in the past.

Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby joins us on Zoom.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

According to the MD Center for Economic Policy, MD spends about $1 billion dollars per year incarcerating roughly 20,000 people convicted of crimes. A third of them come from the city of Baltimore. In 2015, our state spent $17 million dollars locking up people from one neighborhood alone: Sandtown Winchester in West Baltimore.

For many of those who are given long sentences, their lives end while they are behind bars. An essay in the Baltimore Sun a couple of months ago about palliative care for prisoners when they are diagnosed with terminal illnesses caught our attention, and today, we’d like to explore the issue of death with dignity for those who are imprisoned.

Tom's first guest is Dr. Raya Elfadel Kheirbek. She is the author of the essay mentioned above, and the Chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Kheirbek joins us on Zoom.

Then, Tom is joined by three activists working with an organization called the Humane Prison Hospice Project.

LadyBird Morgan is a registered nurse and the co-founder of the Project. She joins us on Zoom.

Marvin Mutch is a Senior Advisor and policy advocate for the Project. He also joins us on Zoom.

And Edgar Barens joins us as well via Zoom. He serves as an advisor to the Humane Prison Hospice Project. He’s a filmmaker whose 2014 documentary called Prison Terminal was nominated for an Academy Award.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Baltimore Ceasefire 365 is a volunteer organization founded 4 years ago to try to end the epidemic of violence in Baltimore, where so far this year, according to the Baltimore Police Department, 289 people have been murdered.

Four weekends each year, the group holds events to encourage those who would do harm to act peacefully, and to help those who are in danger or in mourning. On the Monday following each Ceasefire weekend, we check in with one of Ceasefire 365’s co-organizers.

Letrice Gant, also one of the group's co-founders, joins us today, on Zoom, to discuss the weekend and the state of the Ceasefire movement. She also bears witness with us as we read our weekly list of those who have lost their lives to violence in Baltimore during the past seven days.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

It's time for another visit with Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck, who joins Tom Hall this week with her review of Scharf's Shorts, a collection of short works by local playwright Mark Scharf, presented live in-the-round to open the Spotlighters Theatre's 59th season.

Erin Klarner & Jen Sizer direct an ensemble cast in the eight-play bill: Monument: Nick Cherone & Sean Eustis; Our Place: Glen Charlow & Terri Laurino; Like White on Rice: Beverly Shannon, Mike Papa, & Nick Cherone; Wilderness: Sam David & Glen Charlow; Replay: Mike Papa & Sean Eustis; Off the Grid: Terri Laurino & Sam David; Making Time: Terri Laurino & Nick Cherone; and The Last Ten: Beverly Shannon & Sean Eustis.

Scharf's Shorts continues LIVE on stage at Spotlighters Theatre through through November 7. For ticket information, click here.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.