The Kitchen Sisters Present

Host Frances McDormand leads us through this rich international story collection of land, community and food. From the organic olive groves and vineyards being grown on confiscated Mafia land in Sicily, to secret night...

The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history...

Today, we're thinking about Marcyliena Morgan, a keeper extraordinaire, a linguistic anthropologist who founded and championed the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard. Marcyliena Hazel Morgan was born in Chicago, May 8, 1950 and...

The worlds of a young Canadian immigrant, an Italian pasta-making family, and a 70-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide converge in this story of the San Francisco Treat. A Canadian woman, Lois DeDomenico, marries...

In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to record banned bootlegged music on exposed X-ray film salvaged from...

Muriel "Aggie" Murch and her husband, Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, have lived on Blackberry Farm in Bolinas for some five decades, along with their children, chickens, and horses...

The Real Ambassadors is a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, and jazz history. And it's a love story — between life-long husband and wife partners, Iola & Dave Brubeck and their vision for a better world...

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979. You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and...

We travel to the Mississippi Delta and the world of Lebanese immigrants, where barbecue and the blues meet kibbe, a kind of traditional Lebanese raw meatloaf. Lebanese immigrants began arriving in the Delta in the late...

“Some people might think that honesty boxes are from the past, from a different age, a simpler age, a more honest age, but I would say they're a future thing as well.” – Mark Cousins Throughout the islands and out of...

Willie Nelson and Dallas-born actress Robin Wright, along with some wild and extraordinary tellers, take us across Texas and share some of their Hidden Kitchen stories. Gas station tacos, ice houses, Chili Queens...

Fish Fries, political BBQs, family reunions — during the 1930s writers were paid by the government to chronicle local food, eating customs and recipes across the United States. America Eats, a WPA project, sent writers...

“From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records so that we would be able to hold the government accountable for its actions.” - David Ferriero During the first...

Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not...

The Kitchen Sisters are excited to share the first episode of Radio Pacific, a new monthly show from KALW in San Francisco that takes a deep and creative look at the issues facing California and the rest of our country...

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the...

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal Hill In the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party...

In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens — secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller told us about...

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp...

Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed The Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies...

For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with the issues of...

Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and growing world of Black-Owned Pet Businesses. Lick You Silly dog treats, Trill...

Lady Gaga, Marion Anderson, Beyoncé, Frank Sinatra, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou — musicians and poets have been powerful headliners at inauguration ceremonies across the years signaling change, new beginnings and...

Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memoir cookbook about growing up in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming...

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The...