The Kitchen Sisters Present

In 1981, The Kitchen Sisters interviewed filmmaker Jon Else about his Academy Award nominated documentary, The Day After Trinity, a deeply moving film about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the dramatic story of the creation of the atomic bomb. The film, now showing on the Criterion channel, traces Oppenheimer’s evolution from the architect of the bomb to an outspoken opponent of nuclear proliferation. The documentary features honest and insightful Interviews with Robert’s brother Frank Oppenheimer, several scientists who worked in secret in the isolated high mountains of New Mexico building the bomb, and farmers and ranchers who were displaced by the military and the 6,000 people who descended on the region during the 1940s. Today, the horrifying threat of the escalation of atomic weapons continues. Recently Belarusian President Lukashenko offered nuclear weapons to any country willing to side with Russia in its war against Ukraine. And interest in the history of the bomb and how we got to this place is on the rise. This summer Christopher Nolan’s new biopic about Robert Oppenheimer is hitting IMAX theaters around the country and the Criterion channel is featuring The Day after Trinity. Today, from the Archives, The Kitchen Sisters Present one of our first interviews—a conversation with filmmaker John Else about the making of his extraordinary documentary, The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb.

Behind the scenes at the International Congress of Youth Voices when 131 youth activists,13 to 26 years old, from 37 countries — students, writers, poets, marchers, community leaders all gathered together in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2019, to share and amplify their ideas and energy — to brainstorm possibilities for how to achieve a better world. The International Congress of Youth Voices, founded by author Dave Eggers (co-founder of 826 National) and nonprofit leader Amanda Uhle, gathers the world's most inspiring teen writers and activists. They come from all over the world, including Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the United States, Colombia, Guatemala, Cuba, Australia, Denmark, Nepal, Russia, England, Thailand, South Africa, Ireland, Canada, Uganda, Pakistan, Burundi, France, India, and Puerto Rico. Student delegates are chosen based on their commitment to leadership and social justice and their passion and eloquence as writers. The event is designed to provide a path to leadership for all delegates and represents a continuum from students who have exhibited potential in local writing and tutoring programs to writers and activists who have already made notable achievements at a very young age. Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Nathan Dalton, Brandi Howell, Rachel Templeton & Teddy Alexander. Mixed by Jim McKee. Story Intern: Jonathan Hsieh. Special thanks to Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle and to all the delegates from around the country and around the world who came to Puerto Rico and shared their stories with us. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX. Funding for work of The Kitchen Sisters comes from The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Robert Sillins Family Foundation, The TRA Fund supporting our Intern Program, and Listener Contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions.

Born in 1895 in Lynchburg, VA, Amaza Lee Meredith was an African American architect, artist and educator who taught at Virginia State College where she founded the art department. Despite the fact she was never a registered architect, she was one of the few Black architects practicing at the time, and one of the country's very few Black women architects. In 1939, Amaza designed Azurest South, a tidy white International Style house on the edge of the Virginia State University Campus, where she and her life-long partner Edna Meade Colson lived. Both women maintained significant teaching positions at the University, living openly queer lives. In 1947 Amaza and her sister Maude began developing Azurest North, a 120 lot subdivision and vacation destination for middle class African Americans in Sag Harbor, New York, near the summer haunts of Melville, Steinbeck, Betty Friedan, Spaulding Gray. During the 1950s & 60s the community grew as a Black vacation spot attracting celebrities like Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte. Together, the homes and communities that Amaza Lee Meredith helped establish provided a sense of joy, pleasure, and a safe haven for members of the Black community, at a time when this wasn’t always possible. This episode explores the intersections of sexuality, modernity, art, architecture, and the faith community that nurtured this pair of lovers. Amaza and Edna found their home in each other and shared it openly with their church, their colleagues and their students. Special thanks to host Cynthia Kracauer, writers Jacqueline Taylor and Jessica Lynne, and to Brooke Williams who graciously provided Sag Harbor resident insights, as did advocates and preservationists Georgette Grier-Key, Michael Butler, and Renee Simons. And to Reverend Grady Powell and Reverend Dr.  George WC Lyons from Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. Franklin Johnson-Norwood is the Director of Alumni Relations at Virginia State University, and our excellent tour guide for Azurest South, and to Christina Morris of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This episode was produced by Brandi Howell for the podcast New Angle Voice, a presentation of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Editorial advising from Alexandra Lange and assistance from Virginia Eskridge. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation. Take a look at the illustrated Amaza Lee Meredith profile on the Pioneering Women of Architecture website. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Funding for these programs comes from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Kaleta Doolin Foundation, and contributors to the non profit Kitchen Sisters Productions. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recording studio as he began work on the album and the movie Purple Rain. Susan, a trained technician with no sound engineering experience became the engineer of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, and all that Prince recorded for the next four years. For those four years, and almost every year after, Prince recorded at least a song a day and they worked together for 24 hours, 36 hours, 96 hours at a stretch, layering and perfecting his music and his hot funky sound. In celebration of Prince’s birthday The Kitchen Sisters reprise “Prince & The Technician.” An award winning professor of cognitive neuroscience and a legendary record producer, Susan Rogers has recently written a book, “This is What It Sounds Like," one of Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2022. It’s a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers — some of the best podcasts out there. Find out more at kitchensisters.org.

Chris was a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder called him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimenez… the list is long and mighty.Chris Strachwitz was a keeper. His vault is jam-packed with 78s, 33s, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes, videos, photographs — an archive of all manner of recordings. And an avalanche of lifetime achievement awards — from the Grammy’s, The Blues Hall of Fame, The National Endowment for the Arts – for some 60 years of recording and preserving the musical cultural heritage of this nation through his label, Arhoolie Records.In honor of Chris Strachwitz The Kitchen Sisters reprise The Passion of Chris Strachwitz, produced for The Goethe Institute’s Big Pond series. With interviews with Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. Also featuring selected interviews done by Chris Strachwitz with Howlin’ Wolf and The Maddox Brothers and Rose.Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, mixed by Jim McKee.The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia network from PRX.

Ada Louise Huxtable, who “invented” the profession of architecture critic, wrote countless articles for two great daily newspapers and had a gigantic influence on our understanding of the work of architects, real estate developers, city bureaucrats, and the city itself, over the course of six decades in print. Beginning in 1963, Huxtable was the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper. In 1970, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. With her impeccable civic values, cultivated aesthetic sensibility and lacerating accuracy, Ada Louise Huxtable, praised and razed. Huxtable, who was born and lived her life in New York City, raised the public’s awareness of architecture and the urban environment. She wrote for the New York Times and later for the Wall Street Journal. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Produced by Brandi Howell for the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation’s podcast, New Angle Voice. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson), with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. It is part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century. In honor of Tony Schwartz’s Centennial, The Kitchen Sisters Present an audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound. It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood. He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary. The Kitchen Sisters visited Tony in his midtown basement studio in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone — Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards — and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes. Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress — 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items — some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world. Tony’s Centennial is being celebrated on April 27, 2023, at the Library of Congress, as part of the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference—A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal. This story is part of the Lost & Found Sound series produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Jay Allison and NPR. Special thanks to The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities.

For some eight years now thirty-four Black women have gathered monthly around a big dining room table in the orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA—meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing—grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls that are overwhelming their community. Spearheaded by dancer/choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith and theater director Ellen Sebastian Chang, this House/Full of Black Women—artists, scholars, healers, nurses, midwives, an ice cream maker, a donut maker, an architect, a theater director, a choreographer, sex trafficking abolitionists and survivors—have come together to creatively address and bring their mission and visions to the streets. Over the years they have created performances, rituals, pop-up processions in the storefronts, galleries, warehouses, museums and streets of Oakland. This hour-long special features sound-rich “episodes” of performances and rituals, interviews with sex trafficking abolitionists, personal stories of growing up in the Bay Area, music, Black women dreaming, resisting, insisting. Produced by Ellen Sebastian Change, Sital Muktari and The Kitchen Sisters, narrated by Sital Muktari, mixed by Jim McKee, in collaboration with an evolving House/Full of Black Women collective, Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Funding for this House/Full of Black Women Special comes from The Creative Work Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Kaleta Doolin Foundation, The Texas Women’s Foundation, Susan Sillins, listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions, and PRX. Original funding for House/Full of BlackWomen was provided by Creative Capital, Creative Work Fund, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, MAP Fund, and the Hewlett 50. House/Full of Black Women is part of The Keepers series produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton and mixed by Jim McKee. Archival sounds, recordings and compositions by Alexa Burrell. Visuals created by photographer Robbie Sweeney and designer Kevin Clarke. Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson created some of the soundscape. For names of all the many House/Full members who have had a hand in this project visit deepwatersdance.com.

Many know Ray Eames as the small, dirndled woman behind her more famous husband, Charles Eames. But Ray was the industrial designer bending plywood in the spare bedroom, a talented artist who saw the world full of color, the visionary who treated folk art, cigarette wrappers, flowers, and toys as equally valuable and inspiring. Ray brought the sparkle and inspiration to the legendary Eames Office. The Kitchen Sisters Present Ray Eames from the New Angle Voice a podcast of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, produced by Brandi Howell. Editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. Thanks also to Virginia Eskridge, and Amy Auscherman, Director of Archives and Brand Heritage for MillerKnoll. The archival audio heard in this episode comes from the MillerKnoll archives and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Intro music composed by Emma Jackson. Special thanks to Pat Kirkham, Lucia Dewey Atwood, Llisa Demetrios, Jeannine Oppewall, Donald Albrecht, Meg McAleer and Tracey Barton at the Library of Congress, and Alexandra Lange. Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, and MillerKnoll. Funding for The Kitchen Sisters comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Susan Sillins Foundation, and contributors to The Kitchen Sisters non profit productions.

Elizabeth Hinton, an associate professor at Yale with expertise in mass incarceration, and Sue Mobley, a New Orleans organizer and urbanist, delve into W.E.B. Du Bois' revolutionary work, 'Black Reconstruction in America.' They uncover how Du Bois challenged dominant racist narratives and highlighted the vital contributions of African Americans during Reconstruction. The conversation emphasizes Du Bois' lasting impact on understanding racial equality and calls for a reevaluation of democracy in light of ongoing inequalities.