I’ll be filling in more details about the AMM’s development soon—but for now, here’s a snapshot of all ten Localore projects that unfolded across the country over the past twelve months:

Here’s a video about MapJam 2013—the daylong festival we organized to celebrate the first year of the AMM’s development:

And here’s a round-up of coverage of the project in Current, NPR’s Tell Me More, the Columbia Journalism Review, The National Center for Media Engagement, the Austin Chronicle, and Tribeza.

La Santa Cecilia:

Wood & Wire:

Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers:

Around 9:30 that night, the city experienced a massive blackout, with power failing in all five boroughs. Looting, arson, and rioting occurred across the city, but Disco Wiz and Grandmaster Casanova Fly have their own theories about the effects of the blackout on the creative life of the Bronx and the birth of hip hop.

Lights Out explores what happened that night and how it might have influenced the invention of a new musical and cultural movement.

This story was produced with a grant from In the Dark, a UK-based radio organization. It has since aired on Re:sound, RTE Radio 1, and BBC Radio 4, and was written up by the Guardian’s radio critic.

THEN I got an email—out of the blue—from a student named Melissa Briers who discovered the story and animated the first minute of it. Hooray for random internet collaborations!

I’d love to see this whole story animated some day!

This story was reported with Arlette Flores, Jennifer Gonzalez, Roberto Hernandez, and Steven Ugalde. It was produced by Delaney Hall for Stories from Deep in the Heart, a project of Texas Folklife, and it aired on Latino USA.

This story first aired on All Things Considered as part of NPR’s City Life series.

Austin musicians Lindsey Verrill and Dan Grissom moved into their tumbledown duplex on Annie Street in 2006, and because Lindsey played music and Dan painted, they decided to call themselves the Annie Street Arts Collective.

Seven years later, the name fits. Their band—Some Say Leland—rehearses in their living room every Wednesday night, they host performances on a homemade stage in their backyard, and they’ve become known for the secret shows they put on in unusual outdoor locations around the city—in parks and abandoned buildings, sometimes underneath bridges. Most infamously, they invited audiences to crawl into a downtown sewer duct during SXSW a few years back. “The acoustics down there are amazing,” says Verrill.

I shot and produced these videos about the Annie Street Arts Collective for the Austin Music Map. The first gives you a glimpse at what their secret shows are like, the second introduces Dan and Lindsey and what they do.

(The staff of the Chicago Defender)

A few years ago, I was reading about Gwendolyn Brooks and stumbled across a few references to Lights and Shadows—a poetry column that ran in the Chicago Defender back in the 1920s and 30s. The column published some of Brooks’s earliest poems, written when she was a teenager living in Bronzeville. She describes that time—or I guess just a bit before that time—in her autobiography:

Dreamed a lot. As a little girl I dreamed freely, often on the top step of the back porch—morning, noon, sunset, deep twilight. I loved clouds, I loved red streaks in the sky. I loved the gold worlds I saw in the sky… I was writing all the time. My mother says I began rhyming at seven—but my notebooks date back to my eleventh year only. Careful rhymes. Lofty meditations.

I couldn’t find much information about Lights and Shadows—which made me curious, which lead me into the Defender’s archives, which lead me into a little poetic community I found totally captivating, which eventually lead me to Dewey Roscoe Jones Jr.— the son of the man who edited Lights and Shadows for most of its existence. He’s now the keeper of his father’s collected letters, papers, and writings, and he generously spoke with me and shared some of those materials.

The whole story of Lights and Shadows (at least what I could reconstruct) is up on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Check it out and please spread the word to people or communities who might know more about this history. Most—maybe all—of the poets who published in L&S have died, but I’d love to hear from any friends or relatives who have memories.

This image comes from a 1927 Defender article on Lights and Shadows, which introduced a bunch of the column’s contributing poets. The story was written by L&S editor Dewey Roscoe Jones Sr. (Click for a bigger view).

Exploring the Shel Silverstein archive in Chicago:

One of the things you learn is that “polymath” doesn’t even begin to describe Silverstein. His creativity extended in so many directions that his archivists must be versed not just in turn-of-the-century world children’s literature, but Waylon Jennings’s deep cuts; not just in reel-to-reel tape preservation, but how to keep an old restaurant napkin scribbled with lyrics from falling apart. And you also learn that Silverstein seemed to have a terrific time drawing, rhyming, and singing his way through life.

Like most labor in a globalized world, this work of caring for others flows across borders. Women migrate from far away to tend to children and the elderly in U.S., and many leave their own families back home. They earn more money here than they could in their native countries, but their migration has consequences. Many hire their own domestic workers to care for their families while they’re gone.

This phenomenon, in which people around the globe are linked by the paid or unpaid domestic work they perform, is what sociologists call a “global care chain.” It describes the largely invisible financial—and emotional—network that links the U.S. with other parts of the developing world.

Over nine months of reporting, I traced a single care chain from start to finish. It begins in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and ends on a small island in the Philippines, a country that has become one of the world’s largest exporters of emotional labor.

Our guide is a Filipina woman named Alma, who migrated to New York ten years ago—leaving her daughter, mother, and father in the care of several helpers. We begin in Manhattan, where a group of Filipina workers, including Alma, have gathered to celebrate far from home.

I produced this story for my MA project at the Columbia School of Journalism. It aired on Re:sound on Chicago Public Radio.

For Chris Watson, listening is a complicated thing. It’s about hearing amazing sounds, but it’s also about memory, mindfulness, and ecology.

Originally aired on Re:sound.