Our Rag Radio podcasts feature interviews with historian and graphic nonfiction publisher Paul Buhle, Texas blogger and prison reform advocate Scott Henson, and fiction writer Daniel Chacón, author of ‘Hotel Juárez.’
Novelist Daniel Chacón in the KOOP studios, Austin, Texas, Friday, December 6, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.
Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio in December 2013 were Paul Buhle, Scott Henson, and Daniel Chacón. You can read descriptions and listen to podcasts of all three shows below.
Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist and Rag Blog editor Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.
Historian and publisher Paul Buhle. Photo by Thomas Good / Next Left Notes.
Paul Buhle
Listen to or download the podcast of our December 20, 2013, Rag Radio interview with noted historian and publisher Paul Buhle here:
Rag Radio’s 200th show featured a lively discussion with Paul Buhle, whose latest work, Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith, revisits the radical social message of Jesus Christ in comic art format.
Buhle has been a leading figure on the American Left since the 1960s. A noted historian, educator, writer, editor, and publisher, Buhle is a retired Senior Lecturer at Brown University. He is the author or editor of more than 35 volumes including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes including “A People’s History of American Empire” (with Howard Zinn); “Jews and American Popular Culture” (three volumes); and books on Robin Hood, Che Guevara, Emma Goldman, the Wobblies, and SDS. He is the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James. Alan Wieder, writing at The Rag Blog, called Paul Buhle “one of the most prolific and insightful critics from the American left.”
Buhle was active in the civil rights movement and worked with SDS in the Sixties. He was founding editor of the influential journal, Radical America (1967-1999). (His Radical America Komiks produced in collaboration with underground comix pioneer Gilbert Shelton of Austin, helped introduce the radical new medium to the American Left.) Buhle was also founder of Cultural Correspondence (1977-83), a journal of popular culture studies; and founder and director of the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University.
Criminal justice blogger Scott Henson at KOOP in Austin, December 13, 2014. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.
Scott Henson
Listen to or download the podcast of our December 13, 2013 Rag Radio interview with criminal justice activist and criminal justice activist Scott Henson here:
Scott Henson runs the influential Texas criminal justice blog, Grits for Breakfast (“Welcome to Texas justice: You might beat the rap, but you won’t beat the ride.”). He is a former journalist turned political consultant and public policy researcher. Henson also works as a consultant for the Innocence Project of Texas where he lobbies the Texas Legislature for expanded compensation for exonerees, reforms in eyewitness identification procedures, corroboration for jailhouse snitches, expanded access to habeas corpus writs, and other public-policy reforms.
Henson helped found the alternative magazine, Polemicist, at the University of Texas, and was an associate editor at the Texas Observer. He has worked as a researcher for political campaigns and as a contract researcher for environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Save Our Springs Alliance. Henson co-founded the Sunshine Project for Police Accountability, which successfully campaigned for Austin’s police monitor and oversight board, and has worked with the ACLU and the Texas Electronic Privacy Commission.
Rag Radio’s Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer, from left, with author Daniel Chacón at KOOP, December 6, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.
Daniel Chacón
Listen to or download the podcast of our December 6, 2013 Rag Radio interview with award-winning fiction writer Daniel Chacón here:
Daniel Chacón is author of Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops (2013). His collection of short stories, Unending Rooms, won the 2008 Hudson Prize. He has also won The American Book Award, a Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Peter and Jean de Main Emerging Writers Award. Chacón teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Chacón also has a novel, and the shadows took him, and another collection of stories called Chicano Chicanery. He co-edited The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: The Selected Work of José Anontio Burciaga and is editor of Colón-ization: The Posthumous Poems of Andrés Montoya to be published in 2014 by Bilingual Press and the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame. His fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals and Chacón also co-hosts a literary radio show called Words on a Wire on KTEP-FM in El Paso.
Publisher’s Weekly wrote about Hotel Juarez: “Linked but never repetitive, these beautiful stories are fresh, with just enough Borges-ian magic to make them feel extraordinary… The stories are rooms, images that you can walk into, taking the reader to wherever Chacón wants him to go.”
Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Dreyer was a founding editor of the original Rag, published in Austin from 1966-1977. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.
Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 — Pacifica radio in Houston — on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CST).
The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.
Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.
Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.
Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, January 17, 2013: Activist-scholars Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of SDS and the Weather Underground.
Friday, January 24: Music journalist Margaret Moser, director of the prestigious Austin Music Awards.
Friday, January 31: Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, author of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.
