Podcasts

To kick off our celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we are revisiting two interviews with cultural powerhouses and 2011 National Heritage Fellows taiko drum leaders Roy and PJ Hirabayashi and slack gui...

We're celebrating poetry in this week's podcast. The first Latino and non-academic Poet Laureate of Kansas (and National Council on the Arts member) Huascar Medina reads from and talks about his poetry, making Kansas his home as a Latino poet, his de...

In this tuneful podcast, bassist Stanley Clarke talks about his long and storied career, including his musical partnerships with Chick Corea and their band Return to Forever, his solo career, his collaboration with George Duke, and his approach to wo...

This week, the podcast is divided into two parts with one subject—poetry. Part 1 is excerpts from my 2018 interview with poet Melissa Range while part 2 excerpts my 2021 interview with 2017-2019 US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In this poetry-filled ...

In this podcast Terence Blanchard talks about bringing the sounds of blues and jazz to his opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, his long collaboration with Spike Lee, and the joy of playing live with his group the E Collective.

Meet 2022 NEA Jazz Master Cassandra Wilson and hear about her long and rich singing career in this tuneful podcast

In this podcast, Lynsey Addario talks about working as a photojournalist in places around the world racked by violence and war.

Novelist Marjan Kamali talks about her recent novel The Stationery Shop-- a story that begins in 1953 in Iran and spans 60 years. We talk about Persian poetry and food, living on the hyphen between Iranian and American, and the juggling act of writin...

We’re marking Women’s history month by replaying my in-depth interview with the late Valerie Boyd who wrote the acclaimed “Wrapped in Rainbows: the Biography of Zora Neale Hurston.” In this podcast, Boyd discusses Hurston’s life and work, especially...

Violist Ashleigh Gordon is the co-founder and artistic/executive director of Castle of our Skins—a music initiative in Boston that celebrates Black artistry in music. In this podcast, Gordon talks about founding and programming a Black arts organizat...

Meet the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson! In this podcast, Chair Jackson shares her thoughts about the arts, an artful life, and the Arts Endowment at this time of reopening, rethinking, and reimagining the...

The late pianist and NEA Jazz Master Hank Jones talks about his life in music.

A wide-ranging talk with 2022 NEA Jazz Master Donald Harrison, Jr.