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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After an editor asked him to tone down his racial politics, the first-time author walked away from his book deal, moved to a smaller press and eventually published two books to critical acclaim. He hopes his story helps make the case for why publishers should welcome different voices to the table. -
DreamWork's Turbohas been touted for having a multicultural cast, but does the movie, with its distinctly "urban" garden snails and its ethnic characters, really move beyond racial tropes? -
Six years ago, the mystery writer sent Easy Rawlins off a cliff, seemingly killing him. Now, Easy's back on the streets his creator once called home. Mosley says other than Los Angeles, he and his detective hero don't have much in common, but NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates begs to differ. -
In 1965, sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a U.S. senator from New York, authored a controversial report. It concluded the decline of the black nuclear family was a major component to black poverty. Nearly 50 years later, the Urban Institute has released a follow-up to Moynihan's study that looks at the current barriers poor black families continue to face, and compares those findings to the country's other ethnic groups.
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When Detroit milliner Luke Song made Aretha Franklin's now-iconic 2009 inaugural hat — you know, the one with the big bow? — he had no idea he'd be making thousands more. -
The freshman class of the 113th Congress is the most diverse in congressional history. As part of a series on who the newbies are, NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates profiles Representative-elect Raul Ruiz, who gave up a career as an emergency room physician to improve life in his California desert community of the Coachella Valley.
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NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates profiles novelist Susan Straight, who is putting her hometown of Riverside, Calif., on the literary map. Straight herself is white, but she weaves the black, working-class voices of Riverside into her work.
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The Beverly Hills Hotel, a place fondly known as the Pink Palace, has preserved guests' privacy and indulged their every whim for 100 years. This year will be filled with celebrations of its centennial, as the hotel becomes the first historic landmark in the city of Beverly Hills. -
From murder in the Venice canals to human trafficking in the desert, Los Angeles serves as the perfect setting for Robert Crais' noir novels, starring Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, two PIs who are desperately seeking normal — both for their clients and themselves. -
The idea of an "affordable manicure" was once an oxymoron. That's before Vietnamese immigrants arrived in the U.S. and cornered the market for inexpensive nail-care salons. The industry has offered a path to self-sufficiency for many Vietnamese-Americans in California and around the nation.
