From Our Soundbooth | December 12, 2013

Perhaps it’s just the holiday spirit, but we here at the TMR Podcast are feeling extra generous! Today we’re bringing you twice the podcast, honoring both of the Runners-up of our 2013 Audio Contest: Henry Finch’s “Key Largo,” which was our runner-up in the poetry category, and “Teen Contender,” produced by Joe Richmond, Samara Freemark and Sue Jaye Johnson, and edited by Deborah George and Ben Shapiro with Marianne McCune, which was runner-up in the audio documentary category.

Henry Finch was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1984 and grew up in Henrico. He earned a BA in English from Appalachian State University in 2008, and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2012. His writing appears or is forthcoming from The Massachusetts Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has taught creative writing and rhetoric at the University of  Iowa. He lives in Downeast, Maine, where he writes, composes music, and edits Lit Passages, an online literature/music collaborative project. Find out more at www.henry-finch.com

Radio Diaries Founder and Executive Producer Joe Richmond is an award-winning producer and reporter whose pioneering series Teenage Diaries brought the voices of teenagers to a national audience on NPR’s All Things Considered. Before founding Radio Diaries, he worked on the NPR programs All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday, Car Talk, and Heat. Joe also teaches radio documentary at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The LA Times called Joe, “a kind of Studs Terkel of the airwaves.”

Producer Samara Freemark joined Radio Diaries after a stint in the newsroom of WUOM, Ann Arbor’s NPR affiliate. She has also worked as a freelancer and as a reporter on environmental issues. Before settling on a career in radio she tried out policy research, community organizing, and urban planning, before she decided she preferred soundwaves to spreadsheets.

Sue Jaye Johnson’s work straddles the fields of journalism, art, activism, and technology. She co-produced the pioneering interactive documentaries 360degrees.org and SonicMemorial.org, which received numerous awards including a Peabody Award, the Online News Association’s award for Best Use of Multimedia, the National Press Club Award, the Batten Award for Innovation, as well as a Webby Award. She is a frequent collaborator with Radio Diaries and co-produced Mandela: An Audio History for NPR. In South Africa, she began training a collective of township-based photographers who now earn a living by selling their work internationally. She has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and New York University. She is currently producing a feature documentary film about Claressa Shields.