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.
September 22, 2014 - Poetry has long fascinated former Star Tribune editorial board member Jim Lenfestey, both as a reader and a writer. Back in 1970 a bookseller gave him a collection of poems by Han Shan, or Cold Mountain, a Chinese poet who lived 1400 years ago.
November 18, 2014 - Larry Millett is an architectural historian and writer. His newest book is called "Minnesota's Own." Millett and photographer Matt Schmitt, who's pictures add so much to the book, will be signing copies tonight at Common Good Books.
December 16, 2014 - Northfield native Siri Hustvedt's latest novel "The Blazing World" examines the life and works of a maverick artist who goes to extreme lengths to gain the recognition she believes she deserves. It's turning up on many best books of 2014 lists. It also examines the overwhelming power of public perception in the art world.
December 26, 2014 - MPR's Cathy Wurzer hosts humorist and story-teller Kevin Kling and Matthew Sanford of Mind-Body Solutions on stage at the University of St. Thomas December 9, 2014 for a program about the healing power of storytelling.
January 30, 2015 - Anton Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake reservation with a deep interest in history and language. He writes in the introduction to one of his books on Native history: "The borderland I grew up in was more than an awkward physical nexus of races and communities." Today-a conversation about how that "nexus" still influences his work and writing.
February 11, 2015 - Minnesota author Leif Enger gave the 2015 Heginbotham Literary Lecture Feb. 6th at Concordia University in St. Paul.His best-selling debut novel, "Peace Like a River" was named one of Time magazine's top five books of the year in 2001. Enger was a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio for 20 years.
February 17, 2015 - The Guthrie Theater announced today it has selected Joseph Haj as its new artistic director. Haj takes over from Joe Dowling who retires in June after 20 years with the Guthrie. Haj is returning to the theater after working there as an actor early in his career.
February 27, 2015 - This week, a roundtable discussion on what it's like to be a first generation American.
April 13, 2015 - For the 40th anniversary since the first Hmong family settled in Minnesota, MPR’s Tom Weber interviews three Hmong American artists: spoken word and hip hop artist Tou Saiko Lee, painter Cy Thao, and writer Kao Kalia Yang. They discuss the value of the arts, through which personal and cultural pasts are melded with their present lives.
April 14, 2015 - Today marks the 150th anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. And this year is also the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, which raged from 1861 to '65. Some 24-thousand Minnesotans were soldiers in the Civil War- a war that profoundly changed the nation and the state.