The Kitchen Sisters Present

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, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep.

In this hour Henri Langlois’ legendary Cinémathéque in Paris, The Keeper of...

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 passed away September 28, 2025. We were fortunate to interview her in 2018 as part of the opening story in our NPR series The Keepers, about activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and h...

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 an Italian immigrant, Tom DeDomenico, whose family founded Golden Grain Macaroni in San Francisco. Just after WWII, the newlyweds rent a room from an elderly Armenian woman, Pailadzo Captanian, who teaches t...

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 hospital waste bins and archives. The eerie, ghostly looking recordings etched on X-rays of peoples' bones and body parts, were sold illegally on the black market.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to...

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 two just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

They both have newly published books, and are out on the circuit telling their stories that stand at the intersection of the organic farming movement and...

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. 

Appalled by the racist treatment of Black jazz musicians in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, the Brubecks wrote a musical based on the Jazz Ambassadors Program established by President Eisenhower ...

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 make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and the locations were scattered throughout the country, making it easy for interested parties to attend.

WSPA was the brainchi...

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 1800s, soon after the Civil War. Many worked as peddlers, then grocers and restaurateurs.

Kibbe — a word and a recipe with so many variations. Ground lamb or beef mixed with bulgur wheat, cinnamon, sa...

“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 way places in Scotland, along the rural roads, at the end of driveways, out on their own with no house nearby, you'll find fresh baked bread, homemade jam, cauliflower, scones, Victoria Sponge Cake, cer...

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, Stubb's BBQ, cowboy kitchens, car wash kitchens, space food. With special guests Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kinky Friedman, Joe Nick Patoski,  and so many more.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters with support from the Nati...

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 like Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Stetson Kennedy out to document America’s relationship with food during the Great Depression.

When we were searching for Hidden Kitchens and stories a...

“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 Trump administration, when access to certain websites and information was being threatened, we started our Keepers series about activist archivists, rogue librarians, historians, collectors, curators — protecto...

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 even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all remaining copies were buried deep in the desert. And it was so horrible that it’s blamed for the collapse of the American home vide...

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 today. The hour-long, monthly program features journalists, writers, and documentarians who are grappling with life in the country’s most populous and diverse state.

In this first episode, California legal sc...

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 Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impose segregation as the reforms made after the Civil War began to dissolve.

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 members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression.

Kelly used those oral histories to write his award winning book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depre...

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 immigrants and homeless people, who didn't have official kitchens, using the George Foreman Grill to make meals and a home. Did George Foreman know about this? We called him up to find out.

George Foreman the legendar...

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 surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the midst of the Owens Valley in the Mojave desert, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated for 3 years during World War II. 

Jeanne was 7 years old when ...

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, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful, political, important, risky films and made sure there was a place for them to be seen in the world. And that the people making this...