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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"We are all passing for something or other, aren't we?" says Tessa Thompson's character Irene Redfield. But the movie asks: what does one give up to live a white life? -
In her debut book, My Monticello, author Jocelyn Nicole Johnson asks what it means to claim a home in a place like Charlottesville, Va., — where whom the city belongs to has long been in question. -
When Bethany Morrow was asked to write a new take on the beloved classic, she agreed on one condition: The new March family would look nothing like the old. -
For the Code Switch podcast, we talked to authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray to discuss The Personal Librarian — the fictionalized account of the very real Belle da Costa Greene. -
After a racism controversy, the national trade organization for romance writers had been making progress. Then, it gave a major prize to a book whose hero murdered Native Americans at Wounded Knee. -
Belle Da Costa Greene was one of the most prominent career women of her time, but the world didn't know she was Black. A new novel from Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray tells her story. -
Chef Chris Williams from the Houston restaurant Lucille's talks about how he started the restaurant, the nonprofit that grew from it, and his mixed feelings about Juneteenth. -
The 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre commemorations are winding down, but the neighborhood where it took place, Greenwood, remains forever shaped by the event.
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When author Jewell Parker Rhodes tried to publish a novel retelling the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre, she found that not everyone was ready to reckon with the city's painful, traumatic history.
