Author Christine Hemp talks about her latest book, a memoir "Wild Ride Home," finding red flags in relationships, taking care of aging parents and always keeping your true north. She is an author, poet, musician, speaker and teacher.Read More
Arts
The first time actor Antony Ramos saw In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway production about a Latinx community in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood, he was floored.Read More
‘Traverse Talks’ Episode 13: Becky Albertalli & Scott Leadingham On Literature Helping Form Identity
In this unique episode of "Traverse Talks with Sueann Ramella," NWPB's Scott Leadingham interviews author Becky Albertalli. The two talk about identity, representation of LGBTQIA+ books in school libraries, and how people come out and present themselves to the world.Read More
Ly Tran's memoir House of Sticks brings to mind both the story of The Three Little Pigs and the myth of the unassimilated other in Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child (L'Enfant Sauvage), in its unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty.Read More
Billy Ocasio feels like one of the country's luckier museum directors. He runs the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, still standing strong in Chicago after the pandemic wiped out dozens of small museums across the country.Read More
In this episode of "Traverse Talks with Sueann Ramella," Will O'Neal and Renee Love, leaders within the organization Backyard Harvest, share how the group serves its community and how both they and many of their volunteers got a close-up view of food insecurity within local households.Read More
Artist Paul Rucker is fearless when it comes to taking on terrible moments in American history. One of them, in Tulsa, Okla., was destroyed by a white mob 100 years ago, on May 31, 1921. The catastrophic attack on what was known as Black Wall Street might be the worst single episode of racial violence in American history, with 35 city blocks of Black community destroyed Read More
With the sale of print books rising just over 8% and all unit sales of books surpassing 750 million, Black bookstores would play an integral role in feeding the nation's "sudden" appetite in the plight of Black people.Read More
Amazon has made a deal to buy Hollywood studio MGM for almost $8.5 billion. It's the second-largest acquisition for the company after purchasing Whole Foods.Read More
Heaven is a raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery, reminiscent of both Elena Ferrante's fiction and Bo Burnham's 2018 film Eighth Grade. I cannot, in good conscience, endorse it without a warning: This book is very likely to make you cry.Read More
In this episode of "Traverse Talks with Sueann Ramella," author Ryka Aoki shares how growing up in the U.S., she had a hard time seeing what happens on a societal level, but still wants it to be better, as well as her personal experiences as a transgender woman.Read More
Not only did Shuffle Along bring jazz to Broadway, it was the first African American show to be a smash hit. Its composer Eubie Blake recalled on WNYC in 1973: "When we put Shuffle Along on, on Broadway, we put negroes back to work again."Read More
With just two weeks to go before A Quiet Place Part II makes your local multiplex a less quiet place, Hollywood has started the back-to-cinemas drumroll.Read More
For generations, Sesame Street has been a mainstay of American children's television. But when the show premiered more than 50 years ago on Nov. 10, 1969, it was considered controversial, even radical.Read More
For this Black TV critic, completing Barry Jenkins' ambitious, beautifully brutal, 10-episode adaptation of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad was an emotional journey that touched every nerve of what it feels like to be a person of color striving to matter in America.Read More
In the past year, and throughout history, narratives surrounding Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been rife with violence, hardship and grief. Yet they are so much more than their experiences of suffering — beyond tales of war and isolation, there is joy, confusion, anger and relief.Read More
One of the most recognizable images of Floyd sits just above the spot where he drew his last breath – at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. It’s a haunting, 12-foot mural of Floyd, painted in black and white by Minneapolis-based artist Peyton Scott Russell.Read More
"Son of the Storm" defines these tensions clearly from the start, as a prologue whirls readers into a society already at a dangerous crossroads, at once reaching for new levels of power, and busy walling itself off from risk. The effect is rich, wild, and occasionally dizzying.Read More
You might be using Cicada Safari to track Brood X, which appears to be slowly emerging from the earth in the U.S. all the way from Florida to Michigan. But cicadas are global citizens. In China, the critters have long been symbolically significant.Read More
A Supreme Court justice is gravely ill, ideological control of the court hangs in the balance — throw in a ruthless president and an international conspiracy, and what you have is the plot of Stacey Abrams's new novel, While Justice Sleeps. Yes, that Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician, and she's written a thriller ripped straight from the headlines — inspired by a Read More
Nước — the Vietnamese word for country and water — permeates Eric Nguyen's haunting debut. Signifying both a place of origin and the means by which a boat refugee departs from such place of origin, Things We Lost to the Water poignantly explores all the ways in which Vietnamese refugees are affected by country and water — in sum, by dislocation.Read More
Black women artists like Josephine Baker, Nina Simone and Eartha Kitt contributed to those social gains. Their suffering came not only from their personal battles against day-to-day racism in America, but also having their careers struggle when they spoke out against it. Europe eventually became home to them as well.Read More
You fall in love with a person, but you get a package deal. That's one of the big messages of two new novels that ruminate on love and family, particularly the family that's thrust upon you when you happen to mate with one of their kith or kin.Read More
Every so often, a fantasy series with adventure, magic and an unfairly attractive villain comes along and captures the imagination and attention of a passionate base of readers. And when that series leaps into a fully realized television adaptation? Well then, that niche fixation can become a global fantasy phenomenon overnight. And Netflix is hoping its new adaptation Read More
Chloé Zhao has won the Oscar for directing Nomadland, becoming the first woman of color to win the award and the second woman to win (Katheryn Bigelow, was the first). Zhao was also the first woman to get four Oscar nominations in a single year, in the Best Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture categories.Read More
In a virtual ceremony, Louise Erdrich was named the winner of this year's Aspen Words Literary Prize, for her novel The Night Watchman. The $35,000 prize goes to a work that "illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture."Read More
LeVar Burton will host a week of Jeopardy! this summer, after nearly 250,000 people signed a petition backing the actor and director's long-held aspiration to try out for the job that was left vacant by Alex Trebek, who died last year.Read More
The new book World Travel: An Irreverent Guide is credited to Anthony Bourdain. But it was not really written by the bestselling author, chef and TV personality who died in 2018.Read More
"The Louvre is dusting off its treasures, even the least-known," said Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre, in a statement on Friday. "For the first time, anyone can access the entire collection of works from a computer or smartphone for free, whether they are on display in the museum, on loan, even long-term, or in storage."Read More
To say that The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a sly simulacrum of a rock oral history is to acknowledge only the most obvious of this novel's achievements. Walton aspires to so much more in this story about music, race and family secrets that spans five decades. And, all the glitzy, quick-change narrative styles don't detract attention from the core emotional power of her Read More
This past year of masks, lockdowns, and capacity restrictions has been the most catastrophic 12 months in the history of movie theaters. It has also been a banner year for diversity at the Oscars.Read More
LISTEN BY RACHEL MARTIN April is National Poetry Month, a celebration of poets and poetry that’s been in place for 25 years. Last month, as the U.S. grieved over attacks […]Read More
Youn Yuh-jung is an institution in Korean cinema. Her career spans five decades and includes starring roles in classic Korean films and famous TV dramas. Now, at 73, she has newfound fame in the U.S. for her role in the Oscar-nominated film Minari.Read More
Libertie, a new novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge, is inspired by the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the third African American woman to earn a medical degree in this country.Read More
Growing up poor in Washington state, singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile learned about harmony and rhythm while performing as a backup singer for a friend's dad, who worked as an Elvis impersonator.Read More
In Dr. Fady Joudah’s poem “House of Mercury,” a severe summer storm has blown over Houston. The storm’s destructive winds woke up the narrator’s father, who hears the “snaps and creaks” of the two oaks in the front yard. But it was a “nearly uprooted fig tree,” the poem notes, that brought the father to tears.Read More
Ambreen Tariq's new children's book, Fatima's Great Outdoors is a story about an Indian immigrant family's first time exploring the outdoors, and it's as much a story about curiosity and adventure as it is about trying to assimilate as an immigrant in this country. Tariq says Fatima's story is her own story. "Every moment in that book is real. Every snippet, every story."Read More
Season two of the hit TV series Bridgerton will roll out for fans without its hunky star, Regé-Jean Page, who played Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings. Set during the Regency era in 1813 London, the show's first season was a steamy love story between Simon and Daphne Bridgerton.Read More
The author of two poetry books and a member of the Lhaq'temish (Lummi) Nation, Priest is the sixth poet and first Native person to be selected for the two-year term, a program of the Washington State Arts Commission and Humanities Washington.Read More
Nearly 140 documentary filmmakers have signed onto a letter given to PBS executives, suggesting the service may provide an unfair level of support to white creators, facing a "systemic failure to fulfill (its) mandate for a diversity of voices."Read More
Near the end of HBO's new documentary, Tina, the movie implies the legendary singer has made a decision: after this film rolls out, Tina Turner just might be done appearing in public and talking about her life. It's an odd message, coming from a woman whose life story and experiences have inspired at least four books, an Oscar-nominated biopic, a Broadway musical and, now, Read More
Eddie Izzard, the wildly-admired and inventive comic, was in a museum in the British resort town of Bexhill-on-Sea, where she spent much time as a child, when historians showed her an old badge from the Augusta Victoria school for girls in the 1930's. There was a Union Jack on the crest — and a Nazi swastika.Read More
The Life of the Mind is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. It's about being young-ish at a time in history when it feels like many things might be fading away, including the natural world. The great accomplishment of Smallwood's taut novel is that while it is, indeed, about all those grim subjects, Read More
Children's author Beverly Cleary died Thursday in Carmel, Calif., her publisher HarperCollins said. She was 104 years old. Cleary was the creator of some of the most authentic characters in children's literature — Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Mouse and the irascible Ramona Quimby.Read More
Artist James Ransome is a huge Parliament-Funkadelic fan. So much so, that one of their tunes provided the soundtrack when Ransome accepted the Society of Illustrators' Gold Award during a virtual ceremony on Thursday.Read More
There have been many fine films over the past several years about characters struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, like Away From Her, Still Alice and the recent Colin Firth/Stanley Tucci drama Supernova. But few of them have gone as deeply and unnervingly into the recesses of a deteriorating mind as The Father, a powerful new chamber drama built Read More
James Levine, the immensely accomplished conductor who wielded power and influence in the classical world, and whose singular tenure at the Metropolitan Opera ended in a flurry of accusations of sexual abuse, died on March 9 in Palm Springs, Calif. His physician of 17 years, Dr. Len Horovitz, confirmed his death to NPR, saying that Levine died of natural causes. He was 77 Read More
In John Lanchester's collection, Reality and Other Stories, the supernatural manifests itself through cell phones, social media, computers, reality tv shows, and smart houses. "Signal," the opening story, was originally published in The New Yorker and it's a standout: an eerie homage to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.Read More
What more is there to say about Frida Kahlo? She died in 1954 at age 47. By now she's a cottage industry. Her face (that unibrow, the red lips, the scores of self portraits) reproduced on mugs, matchbooks, pandemic masks, of course tote bags.Read More
Once Upon a Quinceañera opens in Miami, the summer after Carmen Aguilar's senior year. Due to an incomplete internship credit, Carmen has yet to graduate high school. So she's working for an event company called Dreams Come True, where she dresses up as a singing, dancing Disney Princess for birthday parties. She's at one of these parties (dressed as Belle) with her best Read More
