This week we lost two giants in the arts community, Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and poet and musician David Berman. We remember their impact and explore other hard truths, but also look to other artists whose work has us excited for the future.

This week we visit people doing difficult and dangerous work. We talk about threats to domestic security, people fighting for their voices and stories to be told, and an act some may find the most terrifying of all: singing in public.

Happy Moon Week! If you didn’t make it to OMSI or the High Desert Museum to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first crewed space mission to the moon, you can still celebrate our shared celestial history. We’re visiting an exhibition honoring Tomanowos, the Willamette meteorite, getting starry-eyed over Frances Quinlan’s music, and more...

This week we’re handing over the keys for "State of Wonder" to musician and publisher, Fabi Reyna. She's the creator of the guitar magazine She Shreds.

We’re taking a look back at some of our favorite music stories and interviews. We blast out of this galaxy with Afrofuturistic music, come back down to earth to follow one musician’s odyssey, and explore those whimsically designed pianos that have been popping up around Portland.

Bump up your beach reads with three spectacular writers, each grappling with human connection: Kiese Laymon's Southern coming-of-age, science-fiction spectacle from Ted Chiang, and New York Times best-selling author Rosanne Parry imagines life through the eyes of Oregon's most famous wolf.

This week, we’re kicking off our summer playlists. We called in some experts: The people in town actually making the music, writing about it and putting on the shows. Artist and rapper, KayelaJ, is also about to drop a scorcher of a debut, “D.Y.K.E. (Don’t Yield, Keep Enduring)” and we get an exclusive listen to some of the tracks and her creative process.

The continuing search for awesome summer reads led us back to one of our favorite interviews from Portland Book Fest 2018 — and quite possibly one of our favorite book interviews ever! Somaiya Daud’s debut novel lit up the YA world. She is a dazzling conversationalist on sci-fan world-building, the joys of the YA genre, Victorian vs. classical Arabic literary forms, and much more. Also in the show: We meet one of Daud’s early inspirations and  we say goodbye to a truly great literary journal.

Sometimes good stories take a while. This week, long-awaited gems from Astoria’s Fisher Poets and an arts outpost in East Portland. Also, a photographer goes the extra 4,000 miles for the literary story she believes in.

It’s a weird world that obliges you to negotiate for decades to borrow things your great-grandparents made. And where are we if we can’t recover and know our history? This week, classic stories from the L.A. punk scene in the '80s, and Portland queer punk from the ‘90s, and a Native museum’s deal to get some time with priceless tribal artifacts.\