Audio by Adam

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:29 — 5.9MB)

Down a couple of old Maryland country roads that barely show up on state maps you’ll find Grandma Cora, an elderly African American lady who is known throughout those parts for her delicious sweet potato pies, which she lovingly backs on her old stove and sells to make ends meet nicely. I spent an afternoon with Grandma Cora for this “Women in Business” story, and got both happier and fatter as a result.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:16 — 2.4MB)

The Bible says that a woman’s hair is a glory to her, and they take that quite literally at several African American beauty salons that are springing up in the Washington DC and other urban areas.  Come with me on my visit to a salon where being “born again,” amazing hair-dos and “prayerful” and joyous sisterhood intertwine in a sacred (often musical) weave.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:37 — 7.9MB)

Since October 2008, Kay Ryan has been serving as America’s 16th poet laureate, tapped by the librarian of Congress to be ambassador for American poetry. She has published more than half a dozen books of collected poems. and is cherished for her  compact, vivid and accessible verse.  This profile is based on my interview with her at the Academy of American Poetry in New York City.

Here is a to the VOA story I did about her and includes audio links to an extended excerpt from our interview and sound files of Ryan reading several of her poems.

See also my profiles of US Poet Laureates Charles Simic and Donald Hall.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:23 — 4.9MB)

Mother’s Day in America is a special day set aside for honoring mothers, and celebrating all those qualities and actions that make mother “Mom.” But animals and even plants have also evolved their own dizzyingly diverse maternal styles over the millennia, all of which serve to make sure the next generation thrives. Adam interviewed a leading evolutionary biologist and a zoologist about some of those strategies.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:42 — 5.2MB)

Professor Maxine Greene of Teachers College, Columbia University, 91, has spent her educating and inspiring educators, artists and children in humanistic “wide-awakedness” and the social imagination.  Now 91, Maxine  has also been Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education since 1975. She just received a Gold Medal from Barnarnd College.  Maxine grew up with my mother in Brooklyn, and was a frequent dinner guest at our home on East 70th Street.

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The Kitchen Sisters are famous in the radio world, and to National Public Radio listeners, for the wonderful way they combine the sounds and sentiments of real people according to themes and make their lives come alive for all of us. In this profile, I talk to them in a cozy San Francisco locale and learn more about what makes them tick, and how they find their inspirations.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:07 — 27.6MB)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:46 — 13.2MB)

Between Zionism, Socialsim,  Feminism, Judaism, the Holocaust, and all the American, Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian cultural influences that compete for primacy as models for women in Israel, their status and self-image is deeply multi-layered and complex. This half hour documentary, which I completed for National Public Radio back in the early 1990s, offers a sound-rich and varied sampling through the eyes of real women living, working and raising families in that amazing place.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:25 — 5.0MB)

It may be hard or many of us to imagine the glitter and the sometimes risque fun associated with the old nightclubs, burlesques and vaudeville houses of the 1920s and 1930s, especially in New York, where such entertainment reached a certain height of glamor. But what was that life like for those on the other side of the footlights? For this piece, I spoke with the late Dorshka Rafaelson, formerly of the Ziegfeld Follies, and Isabelle Powell,  widow of Adam Clayton Powell, who graced Harlem’s Cotton Club.  Both were  still-beautiful, and beautifully spirited, women.