🎹 Eight-time Grammy winner Jon Batiste opens his 2026 Fantastical Tour Saturday at Chastain Park with the Atlanta Pops Orchestra, a rare orchestral date. He tells WABE Arts what keeps him grounded on the road, why all music is folk music, and what Atlanta means to him. 🎧

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🌳 The neighbors called it the Tree House before Colin Sutter ever moved in. Built in 1999, 231 DeGress Avenue is one of Inman Park's few modern homes: four stories, floor-to-ceiling windows, trees close enough to touch from inside. It has never been on the Inman Park Festival Tour of Homes. Until now. WABE Arts and Culture Editor Sherri Daye Scott talks with co-owner Sutter about the house, a garden with a story, what keeps two Chicagoans rooted in Atlanta and what made them take part in the 2026 Inman Park Festival Tour of Homes. 🎧 

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🎧 She's back. Beloved City Lights host and public radio legend Lois Reitzes returns to WABE for a special conversation with conductor Robert Spano ahead of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's America @ 250 concert series. Spano reflects on the music, the moment, and what it means to mark 250 years of American history through live performance. The ASO's America @ 250 runs April 30 – May 2 and May 7 – 9. 🎭

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🎭 Seven years after her first turn as Ruth Younger, actor Isa Miles is back in Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun.” She says the intervening years have given her something new to bring to the role. Miles speaks with WABE Arts and Culture Editor Sherri Daye Scott about returning to one of American theater's most iconic characters, why the play's themes remain universal, and what it means to lay yourself bare on stage. The Black Renaissance Arts Collective presents the production Apr. 24–26 at the Porter Sanford Arts and Community Center in Decatur. 🎧

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🎭 A Roswell High School senior won Georgia's top poetry competition — and Walt Whitman helped her do it. Rory Berg, the 2026 Poetry Out Loud Georgia state champion, talks with WABE Arts about the Whitman poem that sealed her win, what drew her to the competition as an actor, and the new poems she's bringing to the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington, D.C., April 27–29. 🎧

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A unique garden experience is blooming in Kennesaw this month. Kennesaw State University’s Department of Theatre and Performance Studies is partnering with the City of Kennesaw and Smith-Gilbert Gardens on ‘The Beauty Project: Through the Looking Glass’ — an immersive production for young audiences performed by college students. Sherri Daye Scott talks with KSU professors and co-directors Nikki Adkins and Emily Kitchens, and Smith-Gilbert Gardens Education and Exhibits Manager Vanita Keswani, to find out what happens when a university, a city, and a garden decide to make theatre together.

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From Clark Atlanta University student to Netflix leading lady, actress Taylor Polidore Williams has quickly garnered a worldwide fanbase for her role of Kimmy in Tyler Perry's hit streaming drama, "Beauty in Black." She recently spoke with WABE Arts contributor Kenny Murry on Atlanta's music, culture and what's next down the road on her bucket list.

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Emmy and Golden Globe winner S. Epatha Merkerson stopped by WABE Studios after receiving the Black Women Film Network's On Her Shoulders Preservation Award and ahead of a special exhibit at Atlanta's Apex Museum showcasing costumes from her role as Sharon Goodwin on NBC's "Chicago Med." She talked with WABE Arts editor Sherri Daye Scott about what the honors mean, why Atlanta's creative scene is "jumping," and what still surprises her after four decades in the business. The Apex Museum exhibit runs through April

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enty years after Gordon Parks documented the segregated South for Life Magazine, more than 40 of those photographs are coming to Atlanta. Jackson Fine Art co-owner Anna Walker Skillman traces the gallery's decade-long relationship with the Gordon Parks Foundation — from a meeting in Paris in 2011 to this landmark exhibition, curated by MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey. On view at Jackson Fine Art in Buckhead through June 13, 2026.

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As Women's History Month comes to a close, Atlanta artist/activist and Living Walls co-founder Monica Campana shares how Mexican painter Frida Kahlo saved her life. Campana , who moved to the U.S. from Peru at 15, her the story of identity, displacement, and why stepping out of her front door is an act of resistance with with WABE Arts and Culture Editor Sherri Daye Scott . 🎧

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