This week we're featuring one episode of The Big Read, a series that is essentially a national book club for the radio.  

In 2007, America decided it was having a literary crisis (and Sold a Story wouldn’t come out for another 15 years).  So, in response, the National Endowment for the Arts launched The Big Read, a program to bring people together to read some of the most acclaimed works of fiction by American authors.  Alongside grassroots local events, the NEA produced a series of audio documentaries for The Big Read, each featuring writers, actors and luminaries discussing a particular book – what it’s about, why it’s important, and how it moved them.  

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Original Series Credits:

This program was created by the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

It was written and produced by Adam Kampe and Dan Stone.

Readings for The Joy Luck Club were by Ming-Na.

Instrumental Chinese music performed by Music from China.
Cup of Happiness arranged by Zhou Long.

“The Lost Lamb” and “Song of the Traveling Daughter,” currently playing in the background, taken from Abigail Washburn’s full-length album, Song of the Traveling Daughter, used with permission of Nettwerk Productions.

Special thanks to Philip Brunelle, Susan Cheng, JT Griffith, Erika Koss, Kate Kaiser and Ted Libbey.

For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Dana Gioia.

Jo Reed: For more information, please go to www.neabigread.org, that's www.neabigread.org

Today we're publishing a new collection for subscribers featuring three eyewitness accounts to historical events we often know solely through images or history books. These Radio Diaries are gripping and immersive, with incredible tape that transports a listener from a cursory understanding to one that is rich with individual experience.  We're sharing one of those here: a personal account of surviving the Tulsa Race Riot. 

The art of unscripted audio documentary has been perfected by Joe Richman and the team at Radio Diaries.  For 30 years, this team has encouraged and empowered individuals to report on their own lives.  They work closely with everyday people to document their experience in diary form, and listeners hear actual histories unfiltered by the forces that shape how we collectively remember.  

Check out the full Eyewitness collection at selects.fm or on our channel on Apple Podcasts.

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Original Series Credits:

This story was produced by Nellie Gilles of Radio Diaries, along with Joe Richman, Sarah Kate Kramer, edited by Deborah George and Ben Shapiro. To hear more stories from Radio Diaries, you can find the podcast at radiodiaries.org.

This week, we follow Dmae Lo Roberts and her mother, Chu-Yin, as they travel to Taiwan together.  Dmae seeks an opportunity to grow closer with her mother, but the trip ends with them not speaking.  

First produced in 1989, Roberts’ Peabody Award-winning documentary is highly personal and groundbreaking -- weaving interviews and dramatizations to tell the story of a conflicted daughter and her mother who suffered abuse, starvation and the horrors of World War Two.

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Original Series Credits:

Mei Mei: A Daughter?s Song was written, produced and designed by D. Roberts. Music compositions and engineering by David Patchke with additional music by Trey Gunn. Technical Assistance by Ron Royer.

Featured voices were: D. Roberts, Chu- Yin Roberts, Lucinda Wong, and Mei Jen with songs by the children;'s choir. Mei Mei was mixed at WJHU-FM, John Hopkins University.

Funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, and SoundPrint.

This week we've got a new collection for subscribers and we're excited to share one of them with you today.   

Tossing Away the Keys is a documentary by Dave Isay and Sound Portraits, and a masterclass in audio documentary.  It expertly uses the medium to take listeners somewhere they may never be, and let them hear something they'll never forget.  Give it a listen and check out the whole Early True Crime collection with a free trial of the Selects channel.

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Original Series Credits:

Produced By

David Isay, Wilbert Rideau, and Ron Wikberg

This Pride, we're proud to present a pointed and spicy documentary about fractures in the LGBTQ movement over the fight for gay marriage. This piece offers a nuanced and passionate analysis of something you rarely see put forward for public consumption: internal debate within a civil rights movement.  This is a classic driveway moment, but one of those driveways that the city painted in a rainbow flag...

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Original Series Credits:

Beyond Gay Marriage was hosted and produced by Lisa Dettmer and co-produced bt Elena Botkin-Levy. Financial support was provided by Astraea Foundation and Making Contact at the National Radio Project. Lisa Dettmer is a radio producer with the feminist radio show "Women’s Magazine" at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California, which can be heard at kpfa.org/program/womens-magazine.  You can contact Lisa Dettmer at [email protected].  

If you want to read an article based on this radio documentary go to www.academia.edu/11699431/Beyond_Gay_Marriage_Assimilation_within_the_Queer_community?sm=b

Mitra speaks with Sonja Williams, one of the producers of Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was about her career in audio, and in particular her relationship with archival audio and scholarship.  

It’s the first thing you learn as a radio reporter. Check your levels by asking an interview subject the question “what did you have for breakfast?” It’s disarming. But it’s also revealing.  In this piece by Annie Cheney and Jay Allison, the question becomes the story vehicle and we're treated to a story about the complicated relationship between food, eating, family, and friendship.

More about Concerning Breakfast can be found on Transom: https://transom.org/2015/concerning-breakfast/

Concerning Breakfast was part of a series of pieces produced by Jay Allison with Christina Egloff called The Life Stories Collection. 

At the end of last month, we lost an audio icon: Larry Massett.  As a sort of tribute, we want to share one of the Four Stories About Travel we just put on the Selects Channel.  This piece originally aired on Hearing Voices.  Larry is a legendary producer and host who describes himself as being present at the inception of public media. It's a trip down memory lane, literally and figuratively, with a fun payoff at the end.  

We have got four stories about travel for you. However, these are not your typical travel stories - we've got a story from Outer Voices about nomadic sheep herders in Mongolia, the diary of a foul mouthed teenager on a camping trip read live on Mortified, Producer Larry Massett on traveling with his mother, and an early work by Arlie Adlington featuring a watchmaker considering time travel.  These are transportive, funny and endearing works of audio. As summer approaches, maybe these stories will inspire you to take a visit to…somewhere…

This month we're proud to present one episode of the six-part series Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was (1996), created by PRX and the Smithsonian telling the story of radio’s role in the 20th century transformation of the African American community.

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Original Series Credits:

Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was was a 12-episode radio series hosted by Lou Rawls and produced for the Smithsonian in 1996. Series Producer: Jacquie Gales Webb. Episode Producers: Sonja Williams and Lex Gillespie. Production Manager: John Tyler. Post-Production Engineers: John Paulson and Matthew Sakakeeny. EP: Wesley Horner. 

Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was was made possible in 1996 by a major grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with additional support from the James Smithson Society and the Public Radio International Program Fund, whose contributors included the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

PRX reformatted and redistributed Black Radio in 2021 for its 25th anniversary. Re-formatting by Genevieve Sponsler and Se'era Spragley-Ricks