Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is the Senior Correspondent for Code Switch, a podcast that reports on race and ethnicity. A veteran NPR reporter, Bates covered race for the network for several years before becoming a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is especially interested in stories about the hidden history of race in America—and in the intersection of race and culture. She oversees much of Code Switch's coverage of books by and about people of color, as well as issues of race in the publishing industry. Bates is the co-author of a best-selling etiquette book (Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times) and two mystery novels; she is also a contributor to several anthologies of essays. She lives in Los Angeles and reports from NPR West.
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A dedicated group of fathers in Los Angeles is working to help neighborhood dads do better by their children and their community. -
Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the successful crossing of the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, a key moment in the civil rights movement. Journalist Ethel Payne was there. -
Oprah Winfrey has named Ruby, a novel about a beautiful, abused woman in Texas, as her March book club selection. That could make first-time novelist Cynthia Bond into a literary star. -
Audiobooks as we know them have been around for about 25 years. But the form really took off when MP3 players like the iPod came out.
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From the time of slavery, some light-skinned African-Americans escaped racism by passing as white. The new book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, explores what they lost. -
Twenty years ago, Diana Gabaldon's time-travel epic Outlander shot to the top of the best-seller lists — and stayed there. NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates digs into the enduring potency of Gabaldon's magic. -
In her new book, Rachel Howzell Hall introduces Elouise "Lou" Norton, a fiercely ambitious homicide detective who patrols the same Los Angeles streets that she — and Hall — grew up on. -
Speculation about her grandmother's life in China in the early 1900s provided Tan inspiration for her latest novel, out Tuesday. Valley is an opus that covers half of a tumultuous century, ranges across two continents and involves love, deceit, forgiveness and, ultimately, redemption. -
The 13th Annual U.S. Sumo Open took place over the weekend, bringing contestants from around the country and even the world. Some don't fit the traditional Sumo profile as amateur Sumo becomes increasingly diverse.
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Two new books published Tuesday tell the story of Harlem. The first features the white women involved in the Harlem Renaissance. And the second profiles three black female artists during World War II.
