April 21, 2016 - MPR’s Euan Kerr looks back at the career of the musical genious Prince, who passed away April 21st, 2016. Kerr interviews numerous individuals who reflect on Prince.
February 4, 2016 - MPR’s Euan Kerr interviews the creators of new play “George Bonga: Black Voyageur.” The History Theater pulls together a dream team of playwright Carlyle Brown, director Marion McClinton, and actor James A. Williams to tell the story of African American voyageur George Bonga. The story focuses on a time in 1837 he was sent into the wilderness during a winter storm in pursuit of an Ojibwe warrior accused of murdering a white man. What was once perhaps viewed as a historical oddity now becomes an examination of the racial tensions of pre-statehood Minnesota.
December 4, 2015 - All Things Considered presents an MPR Special Report on the shooting of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis. Segment includes a chronology of shooting, history of Minneapolis police shootings, community reaction, and the many questions that have followed in Clark’s death.
August 7, 2015 - Joseph Haj says he is drinking from a fire hose. Five weeks after taking over as artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis he's immersed in learning his new job. He says he's unlikely to make major changes anytime soon, but Euan Kerr reports Haj is building on some basic principles.
May 18, 2015 - As members of the Minnesota Orchestra returned tired and triumphant from their whirlwind tour of Cuba Sunday night, MPR’s Euan Kerr reflects on the significant concert performance.
April 17, 2015 - MPR’s Marianne Combs reports on Internationally acclaimed author Louise Erdrich’s first-ever show of visual art, titled "Asynchronous Reading." Combs interviews Erdrich about items in the exhibit.
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.
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.
September 12, 2014 - A new production called "Marcus; Or the secret of sweet" opens this weekend at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It tells the story of a young man wrestling with his identity as he comes of age in a small town in the Louisiana bayou.
August 5, 2014 - In her new novel, "Everything I Never Told You," novelist Celeste Ng quickly plunges readers into the depths of a family tragedy.Late one night, after the Lee family spends a seemingly normal evening filled with the tiny joys of parents and children, 16-year-old Lydia in a pond near the family home. No one in her family, the author tells her readers, will remember their fleeting moments of happiness."Instead they will dissect this last evening for years to come," Ng writes. "What did they miss that they should have seen? What small gesture forgotten might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure."In "Everything I Never Told You" Ng explores misery of losing a child, while also using uses the story to examine the challenges of a mixed family in the Midwest during the 1970s, a time when interracial marriages and their offspring made attracted unwelcome and sometimes hostile attention. She will read from the novel at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Magers and Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis.Ng said the book grew out of a story her husband told her about a little girl he knew who nearly drowned when she fell in a lake. The story touched Ng because of her own fears of the water, and she began writing about the implications for the family. As she wrote, the story developed and became about a lot more.In writing the novel, Ng, 33, began drawing on her own background as an Asian-American who grew up in Pittsburgh and in the Shaker Heights, Ohio, area near Cleveland. But she decided to set the story in the 1970s. "That seemed like a very poignant era to me," Ng said. "For her to see her daughter have a lot of opportunities that for her had maybe now passed."