/Audio by Adam/

Radio and Audio Features and Documentaries

Author: Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips has been a radio features journalist and audio documentarist and oral historian since 1986, both as public radio freelancer and, since 1993, as a career journalist at the Voice of America. Adam has won nearly twenty international, national and in-house awards for his work, which highlights the experiences and realities of everyday people with extraordinary stores to tell, and which makes extensive use of found sound and music to create a “theater of the mind.” Adam teaches Audio Documentary Making at the New School’s Graduate School of Media Studies, and Oral History at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. His combines his lifelong interests in mythology, theater and community building in his celebrancy practice, which uses ceremonies to mark life’s milestones and the processes of nature. Adam was ‘born, bred and buttered’ in New York City.

Celebrity Versus Heroism in American Culture

We in the USA toss off the word “hero” quite easily in the media, and even in everyday speech. However, sometimes, what might really be meant is “celebrity,” which is not the same thing. This long form documentary contrasts celebrity and heroism, and explores what the conflation of these two ideals has to say about […]

Arlandria Renters Strike (VERY archival)

This is the first piece I had on the air for which I was actually paid (God bless Pacifica). It dates back to 1986, and chronicles one rent fight in a low income area of Arlandria Virginia, just outside DC.

Profile of the Poet Annie Finch

Annie Finch is one of the most intelligent, sensitive and prescient poets writing about poetry and women’s poetry in particular. Here is a story I did about her when a new collection of her poems had been published. What a voice!

American Profile: Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner is one of America’s foremost dramatists, and not only because of his epic Angels in America. He also probes and continues to probe our culture and its values — about sexuality, money, race — and other things many of us would rather just leave alone. Here is my American Profile of Kushner, which […]

Allen Ginsberg Raw Interview February 3, 1994

Allen Ginsberg was one of the greatest poets, and most generous Americans of the 20th century. I interviewed him quite a bit in 1994 in connection with the publication of his collected poems, and for later for the post-mortem tribute I produced after his death in 1996 (also on this blog). I thought my conversation […]

America’s Search for the Spirit

Despite our technically secular society, questions of meaning and the spirit are as meaningful as ever. In his long form documentary narrated by Gary Edquist, Adam Phillips spoke to experts and everyday people alike about that hunger, the roots of its urgency, and what some are trying to do to live lives of quiet “non-desperation.”