Award-winning poet Ricardo Ruiz focuses on telling the stories of his community, for his community. NWPB’s Rachel Sun interviewed Ruiz about that work, and his approach to collaborative storytelling through poetry.Read More
El galardonado poeta Ricardo Ruiz se centra en contar las historias de su comunidad, para su comunidad. Read More
Catherine McKinney is a sister of a person with developmental delays. She knows firsthand the joys and challenges families face when seeking opportunity and community for their loved ones.
At Clallam Mosaic, where she is the program and communications director, McKinney helps families like hers find community through recreational programs that range from martial arts to Read More
Brent Bowen started playing pinball as a kid in the Tri-Cities. Now, he owns seven pinball machines and hopes to start a league in the Tri-Cities, where there’s a dearth […]Read More
Moss drapes over trees in Olympic National Park like the table dressings of fairies and the blankets of sprites. This place inspires writers — from amateurs to poets to public radio reporters — and welcomes visitors each year into its majesty.
Our national parks tend to do that; be places of awe-inspiring beauty, great adventures through bushwhacking and overnights Read More
Five years since it was first published, Maps, a collection of poems by Tacoma writer Christina Vega, is still relevant today as a response to social injustice, they said.
“I'm asking readers to return to the work,” Vega said. “Let's look at it again, these issues are still here.” Read More
A group of poets in Kittitas County will honor eight important Washington women in verse.
March is Women’s History Month, and this Friday at Gallery One in Ellensburg, the poets will perform their crown of sonnets, a succession of seven, separate sonnets, at the Women’s History Month Poetry Extravaganza. Read More
Can an instrument suit your personality? Dr. Jacqueline Wilson of Yakama would say so. She believes her personality fits best with a large, low sounding, double reed woodwind instrument: the […]Read More
Sara Minkara lost her sight at the age of seven but gained a greater awareness of herself and the world around her. Because she can’t interact with labels from a […]Read More
April is national poetry month. NWPB’s Lauren Gallup interviewed Tacoma’s poet laureate on the art form, and its lasting influence.Read More
More Murrow News Stories PULLMAN, WASH – WSU has had a guest writer series available online throughout the entire semester. These involve guest lectures from novelists, Pulitzer Prize winners, and […]Read More
The pandemic is still churning, but as we round the corner on its second year, we can look back on how we’ve adapted, created and lived. One mark of this perseverance is the rollout of the Tacoma Creates program, the first program in Washington state under recent Cultural Access Legislation. Read More
There will be 24 films in the official competition this year, a few more than usual over the festival's almost two-week duration. There are dozens of additional films from around the world being screened out of competition. A new section called Cannes Premieres has also been organized to show selections from a year's worth of cinema that were missed because of the pandemic.Read More
In this episode of Traverse Talks with Sueann Ramella, author Chigozie Obioma talks about how his time in Cyprus for school and growing up in Nigeria shaped his work, the […]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
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
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
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
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
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
NPR talks to Ahuja about the inspiration and process behind capturing the girls' ordinary lives: their hopes, dreams, anxieties and frustrations.Read More
Every year, as a set-up for the Tony Awards, we take you backstage to meet people who aren't even eligible. These are Broadway's essential workers – ushers, stage managers, costumers. But this year, the Tonys seem like a faraway dream; even though nominations for the shortened season were announced in October, no date has been set. So, I decided to check in with some of Read More
Mama (Beautiful Skin) — Natal-San Miguel added the parenthesis — belongs to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C. It's part of their first online exhibition. Twenty six of Natal-San Miguel's photos are on view in "Expanding the Pantheon: Women R Beautiful." His subject in this one has vitiligo. Pigment is missing from parts of her skin. She's dappled. And Natal-San Miguel Read More
Arts and culture make up a huge, $877 billion industry that generates more than five million jobs across the country. But the amount of federal funding for the arts is tiny when compared with smaller industries like agriculture — so what are arts organizations hoping for under the Biden administration?Read More
As 2020 came to a close, we asked artists and authors about the songs that helped them survive a strange and devastating year. We also posed that question to you, and compiled a playlist of 101 songs that you played over and over again this year. Some songs offered an escape. Some infused joy and despair.Read More
For centuries in Italy — the cradle of Renaissance masters — women with artistic talent were not allowed to enter academies. And the names of the few female artists from centuries past have mostly faded into oblivion.Read More
Produced by a diverse group of filmmakers assembled by 1504, a studio based in Birmingham, Ala., For The Sake Of Old Times pairs the performance of "Auld Lang Syne" with archival footage from 2020, particularly of the summer's racial justice protests.Read More
Rare were the Christmas rom-coms with Asian, queer, Latinx or disabled characters. When Black characters started to show up, they generally played sidekicks — or they starred in family holiday movies, not the kind of Christmas rom-coms where Mom's always there to help with a thorny relationship dilemma, the cider is forever mulled and not a single problem can't be solved Read More
The way loneliness skulks in one of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poems probably would have felt familiar even before the pandemic forced us into more isolating situations.Read More
Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan star in the new film, which imagines a romantic relationship between British paleontologist Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison, the young wife of a geologist.Read More
The Journey is an ingenious use of a virtual performance space. Silven invites 30 audience members to travel to his childhood home in Scotland where they interact in amazing feats of magic.Read More
Bridges was the little girl depicted in that famous Norman Rockwell painting — the first Black student at her New Orleans elementary school. Now, she's written a book to tell kids her story.Read More
Public speaker Dawn Shaw shares how resilience, perspective and the power of choice, help people find inner beauty. The removal of a tumor at birth left Shaw with facial paralysis. She is an author of three books, including her memoir "Facing Up to It" and more recently an inspirational guide: "Facial Shift, Adjusting to an Altered Appearance."Read More
Irving Berlin's classic musical turns 85 this year, and a group of artists are paying tribute with a brand-new video version of one of its songs, "Isn't This A Lovely Day (To Be Caught In The Rain)?"Read More
Museums are facing mounting pressure to make their collections more representative. At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, one artist created a fund to acquire other pieces by under-represented artists.Read More
It's hard to predict exactly how theater will come back after the pandemic, but here are a couple guesses: Fewer crowds, more collective imagination, and a focus on racial and environmental justice.Read More
As the central character struggles with grief and shock at her late husband's infidelity, author Sue Miller keeps deftly shifting what readers might anticipate to be the ending of this novel. Read More
The Rodin Museum in Paris is selling sculptures to pay the bills — and that's exactly as the artist intended. When he died in 1917, Rodin left the museum plaster casts for just this purpose.Read More
While the 2020 Emmy nominations announced this week were notable for the number of Black shows and creators, they were woefully lacking representation of Latinx talent.Read More
Rosamund Pike stars in Radioactive, a biography of the pioneering scientist, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to claim it in two different scientific disciplines (physics and chemistry). The director, Marjane Satrapi, the Oscar-nominated Iranian-French graphic novelist and filmmaker (Persepolis), tells the story in an ambitious but uneven fashion.Read More
In a survey of more than 750 museum directors, 33% of them said there was either a "significant risk" of closing permanently by next fall or that they didn't know if their institutions would survive.Read More
A new documentary catalogs the rise of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Christopher Jackson and other members of the hip-hop group Freestyle Love Supreme in the mid-2000s before they became famous on Broadway.Read More
Hana Tooke creates a memorable villain, Matron Gassbeek, who menaces the feisty orphans of The Unadoptables in the grand tradition of awful authority figures like Miss Trunchbull and Viola Swamp. Read More
The lights have dimmed for a couple of months at the historic Liberty Theater in Dayton, Washington, due to the coronavirus. But its manager has plans to reopen the doors this summer.Read More
When COVID-19 struck, the theatre in Pullman was preparing its final show of the season, Thoroughly Modern Millie. Associate director Michael Todd says it had even hired actress Sandrinne Edstrom to come from New York for a couple of months to play the lead role. When the show was postponed, Ms. Edstrom was quarantined in Pullman. Still is. So they made the best of it.Read More
When the Roosevelt administration rolled out millions of dollars to fund artists, musicians, writers and actors, it wasn't just about job creation. It was to unite a nation in turmoil.Read More
A film of the original Broadway cast performing Hamilton was scheduled to hit theaters on Oct. 15, 2021. Now, it's coming to Disney+ 15 months ahead of schedule.Read More
Dennehy, who died April 15, plays a suburban widower who befriends a mother and her son in one of his last films. It's the kind of deeply lived-in performance that Dennehy was known for.Read More
This year's Pulitzer Prize Board awarded its first Audio Reporting award to the staff of This American Life, for a piece on the Trump administration's "remain in Mexico" policy.Read More
Kaouther Adimi's novel tells the real-life story of Edmond Charlot, the Algerian bookseller and publisher who witnessed his country's independence struggle — and famously discovered Albert Camus.Read More
