Swimming in Dreams

What’s the point of all of this? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves. For child-refugees who’ve come to America (and their descendants), attempting to answer this question is inevitably tied with wondering why fate, God, or whatever higher power they believe in has given them opportunities that those who came before them did not have.If you’ve ever asked yourself what it is that you need to be doing in life, this story is for you. You don’t have to come from a refugee background to relate. It’s simply the story of a young man who’s beginning to seriously question his lot in life, intertwining it with his family background, and coming to terms with the nature of it all. By exploring the three lives of a now-reintegrated middle-aged man who was sentenced to prison at 15, a college student who once couldn’t dream, and a high school student balancing what she owes to her mother and to herself; Ethan hopes to answer one question: what am I here for, if anything?
Producer: Ethan Lo Featuring: Choy, Paw, Neesha

The Reality Teacher

In the summer of 2019, I took off on a cross-country road trip to discover my father’s mysterious hippie past. Though I grew up with a dad who worked as an accounting professor, all throughout my childhood I heard stories of my dad building log cabins in Washington Woodlands, running a granola coop and my half-sister born on the kitchen table. Join me as I travel across time and space to uncover the truth of it all and learn from “the reality teacher.”
Producer: Elena Press  

To the Beat of the Drum

When you feel at home thousands of miles away from your birthplace, what choice do you have but to return? I take a return trip to the Festival of the Rosary—an African syncretic festival in the southeast of Brazil. In returning, I learned African diasporic peoples might be connected by more than just African ancestry. Marked by cultural loss from the middle passage, this festival births a culture of its own. Its songs and rituals speak to the suffering of slavery and embrace a remembrance of forgotten homelands. As a black person from the United States, being in the presence of this grieving made room for something else to take root. Producer: Mylan Gray Featuring: Ana Luzia Da Silva, Padre Jailson, Rainha Cleusa, Dayonna Tucker, Ramona Greene, Cameron Woods  

Seekers

In her late thirties, Lanie, Sophie’s mom, became a born again Christian. Christianity gave her life meaning and happiness. When Lanie found God, “All the heaviness was just lifted.” Sophie, an atheist, struggles to find purpose in her own life. In this story, Sophie sets out to determine if what saved her mother could save her, too. Producer: Sophie McNulty  

Klezmer for My Grandmother

In the summer of 2019, I fly to Israel with a single goal in mind. I want to play a song. But not just any song. I want to play a Klezmer song. This podcast follows my journey meeting Jewish musicians and dealing with family tragedy to compose a personal song. “Music doesn’t lie.” You’ll agree when you hear how beautiful, haunting, and inspiring Klezmer music can be.
Producer: Daniel Helena Alexander

Coming of Age (Online): Imaging Queer Futures

What does it mean to (be queer) and come of age on the internet? In the past ten years, the queer games movement has exploded. Around the world, more and more people feel like they can make free and simple and strange games — ones that speak to queer stories and experiences. But it wasn’t always this easy. Some queer games used the earliest, clunkiest internet to find each other in crisis, to find friends, community, and a lifeline support in a time when no one was paying attention. Follow the journeys of queer gamers as they reflect on their earliest experiences online — experiences of freedom and discomfort, of community and isolation. They’ve since become architects of the internet, contributing to online communities as media scholars and game developers, but for these queer gamers, it all started way back. Producer: Julie Fukunaga Featuring: Pedro Gallardo (he/him), Teddy Pozo (they/them), Kat Brewster (they/she)

Weird, F***** Up, Amazing

I grew up in the sprawl of Los Angeles. I grew up on garage shows, Whiskey-A-Go-Go on Sunset Boulevard, classmates rapping on SoundCloud, my mom driving me an hour and a half to a venue in Orange County. My experiences with DIY music communities have been among the most important aspects of my life; yet, the deeper I get into this world, the more I hear people tell me that I missed out on “the glory days.” In this story, I travel to Asheville, North Caroline to prove that DIY is, in fact, not dead, but that young people today are making the subculture more accessible and creative.

Producer: Hannah Scott Featuring: Mark Hosler, Emma Hutchens, Davaion “Spaceman Jones” Bristol


An Evening with Sarah Broom

Wednesday, February 12
7:30pm
Cubberley Auditorium

Free and Open to the Public -Tickets Required.

Reserve Free Tickets Here:
http://bit.ly/SarahBroomStanford

Sponsored by The Stanford Storytelling Project and The McCoy Center for Ethics in Society

Join us for a special evening with Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House, winner of the 2019 National Book Award and featured on dozens of 2019 Best Books lists. Through the intimate story of her family’s home, The Yellow House offers a new story about not only New Orleans but about defying the forces of race and class in the American neighborhoods we rarely see.  Broom will read from her work and discuss how its blend of memoir, journalism, and historical analysis offers us a way to recover from the mythologies that so frequently distort our understanding of ourselves and our country. 

 Sarah M. Broom’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine among others. A native New Orleanian, she received her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016 and was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011. She has also been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York State.

“Every few years, a book comes along that teaches readers of memoir how to read and writers of memoir how to write. Calling Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House a memoir feels wrong. Somehow, Broom created a book that feels bigger, finer, more daring than the form itself.” 

— Kiese Laymon.


Gerald Vizenor on Native Survivance and the Literature of Engagement

Wednesday, January 15
5:00 PM
Paul Brest Hall
RSVP required
Please join us for the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor Lecture on Public Service and the University with award-winning author and Native American advocate Gerald Vizenor on January 15, 2020. The reception begins at 4:30pm, followed by the lecture from 5:00-6:00pm, in Paul Brest Hall.

Gerald Vizenor, professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is a citizen of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. He has published more than 30 books, novels, critical theory, cultural studies, and poetry collections. Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity, a collection of essays, and Blue Ravens and Native Tributes, two historical novels about Native Americans who served in the World War I in France, are his most recent publications. Mr. Vizenor has received many awards, including the American Book Award for Griever: An American Monkey King in China, and the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award.

His presentation, entitled “Native Survivance and the Literature of Engagement” begins with a reception at 4:30pm, where you can meet and talk with Mr. Vizenor, followed by a lecture at 5:00pm in Paul Brest Hall at Stanford University. 

Please RSVP here.