Tom Quinn & Parasite
Tom Quinn championed director Bong Joon Ho and Parasite to a historic Academy Award for best picture. In this Q&A, the producer-distributor talks about his rise from video store clerk to film executive. Read more …
Koko Taylor and the Women of Chicago Blues
No woman was blues-ier than Koko. In this feature from 1998, she and the women who sing the Blues in Chicago’s smoky nightclubs talk about their craft — and the men who dominated their lives. Read more …
William Ivey Long Steps Off Broadway
If you make it on Broadway, do you have an obligation to care about the dying farming town where your father grew up? William Ivey Long believes you do. In this 2004 profile, the Tony-Award-winning costume designer gives Seaboard, N.C., a makeover. Read more …
Mike Wiley and His Singular Stories
They elbow one another for space in his mind: young black teenagers and their worried mothers, old white supremacists and their nervous wives, skeptical lawyers, gravelly voiced journalists and a slave who mailed himself to freedom inside a box.
Mike Wiley not only plays them all on stage — often more than two dozen characters in a single performance, with no costume changes and few props — the documentary theater actor and playwright rehearses himself to sleep at night with their dialogue, their humanity and inhumanity, strumming through his head. Read more …
Mary Pope Osborne and The Magic Tree House
Osborne made history cool by wrapping it around a time-traveling tree house. She became the second-best selling children’s author in history, behind only J.K. Rowling — and helped multitudes of children learn how to read. Read more …
Carl Kasell of NPR
Kasell began practicing his newscaster voice as a child and got his first on-air job at 16. He went on to anchor National Public Radio’s newscasts for more than 30 years and later served as judge and scorekeeper for the news quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! This profile from 2001 shows why he was the heart of NPR. Read more …
Beth McNichol 