This collection encompasses 50-plus years of interviews, readings, speeches, and reports on the vibrant literary scene in Minnesota. Not only home to giants F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, our state has an array of incredible contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights. Their words make up majority of this collection.
Repeatedly being named the “Most Literate City in the United States,” the Twin Cities has played host to numerous visiting national writers via book tours, festivals, and lectures. Many recordings of these are also included.
This project was funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
May 13, 1999 -
May 18, 1999 - While it seems we're constantly assailed with stories of writers being offered huge advances on the strength of a single sample chapter: the journey to being a published author is often long and lonely. Just ask Minneapolis writer Wendy McCormick who labored for years, and crossed an ocean, before she finally saw her name in print. McCormick's first book, a picture book for children, is appropriately enough, about travelling.
May 21, 1999 - The Twins haven't been doing so well recently. But as commentator Nanci Olesen has found out, recently winning isn't necessarily the important thing.
May 26, 1999 - With his stack of vetoes behind him, Governor Ventura has launched his national promotional tour for his autobiography "I Ain't Got Time To Bleed". This evening he'll appear on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Minnesota Public Radio's Laura McCallum joins me now from the NBC studios where taping will get underway in a little while.
May 31, 1999 - The May edition of our "Voices of Minnesota" series, featuring novelist Jon Hassler, Regents Professor at St. John's University and Ian Barbour, the Carleton College professor who recently won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
May 31, 1999 - A PRI presentation of "The Mississippi River: A River of Song" by Smithsonian Productions. This program in series is titled “Land of Lakes and Immigrant Songs.”
June 2, 1999 - MPR’s Lorna Benson interviews writer Elva Trevino Hart, who recollects on the six years of her childhood in Minnesota watching her brothers, sisters, and parents work long days in the fields near Moorhead. In her new book "Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child", Trevino Hart details her family's annual journey north from a small town in Texas.
June 4, 1999 - Theatre de la Jeune Lune's The Golem; Penumbra Theatre's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf; and Footloose musical at the Orpheum Theatre.
June 11, 1999 - "Bridget Jones' Diary," the fictional daily musings of a 30-something British single woman has created a literary sensation. Millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic have shared Bridget's despair over dieting, family and in particular her love life. Author Helen Fielding, now touring the U.S. to promote the paperback edition, says she didn't expect Bridget's story to strike such a chord with women everywhere. Many can relate to the kind of "doomed-to-fail" new year's resolutions Bridget lists on the first page of her diary.
June 16, 1999 - J.F Powers, One of Minnesota's most acclaimed authors died on Saturday at his home in Collegeville. He was 81 years old. Powers' first novel, "Morte D'Urban" won the national book award in 1962. In the following years, Powers published a collection of short stories, but it took him more than two decades to complete his next novel. Like most of Powers' work, that book, "Wheat that Springeth Green," explored the world of the priesthood. In 1988, just after the novel's publication, Powers told Minnesota Public Radio he'd never considered the priesthood himself.