The Kitchen Sisters Present

“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...

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 eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls overwhelming their community.

Spearheaded by dancer and choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith and theater direct...

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 Paws enamel ID Tags, The Dog Father of Harlem's Doggie Day Spa, gorgeous rainbow beaded Dog Collars from The Kenya Collection, Sir Dogwood luxurious modern dog-wear.

Chaz Olajide of Sir Dogwood wasn’t finding...

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 reflecting the mood of the country and a new administration.

In January 1973, following the Christmas bombing of Vietnam, conductor Leonard Bernstein gathered an impromptu orchestra to perform an "anti-inaugural conc...

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 community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants established in 1866. 

Before she began writing books, Edna had been a celebrated chef at Cafe Nicholson in New York City in the 1950s where E...

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 Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history.

Cecilia Chiang introduced regional Chinese cooking to America in the 1960s, revolutionizing what most Americans thought Chinese cooking was. Ele...

A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement, advocating for affordable housing for low-income families.  

Catherine Bauer’s life divided into two names and two geographies:  her urban...

Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody, Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian women's movement to architecture during the 1970s. Her environmental fantasy workshops played a crucial role in galvanizing the community, providing a creative and empowering space within a male-dominated profession. 

Growing out of other consciousness raising techniques, free...

It is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the day when millions of Americans go to the polls to vote for who will lead their towns, their states, the nation. Souls to the polls today across the country, and so much hangs in the balance.

On this fraught and tender Tuesday, when all our nerves are frayed, we offer a moment of respite and contemplation — an episode of the podcast Constellation Prize from radio producer and filmmaker Bi...

July 17, 2024, Washington, D.C. Some 200 young people from across the nation aged 14-19 — aspiring poets, storytellers, MC's, activists — are gathered in the nation’s capital for the 29th annual Brave New Voices Festival — four non-stop days of slam poetry competition, coaching, workshops, late-night freestyling and in 2024, voting information.

In summer, as the election loomed larger and larger we decided to turn our micro...

Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy.

It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. And we had just bought our first cassette recorder, a Sony TC-D5M. We hadn’t even taken it out of the box or been trained on it when we were invited to a Tupperware party our friend Kirsten was hosting. This was 1980 in Santa Cruz, a stronghold of the women’s move...

As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do since 2018. He’s created a community-focused meeting place in San Francisco — a gathering space for people to watch presidential debates, meet people working on the front lines of social change, and discuss issues with policy makers in person. From community forums debating th...