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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In Power Concedes Nothing, civil rights attorney Connie Rice describes brokering peace between the Los Angeles Police Department and minority populations.
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In The Barbarian Nurseries, Hector Tobar explores the inconsistencies in the country's dependence on illegal immigrants even as some Americans persist in keeping them at arm's length.
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The heroine of Denise Hamilton's latest novel is a crisis management expert charged with cooling down the media maelstrom after an old friend is involved in a high-profile crime.
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Fifteen years after she led the prosecution against O.J. Simpson in one of the most public trials of the century, Marcia Clark returns to the courtroom. But this time, it's to make her fiction debut as the writer of a new legal thriller novel, Guilt by Association..
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Between 1915 and 1975, millions of African-Americans left their homes in the South for the relative freedoms of the North. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an exhaustively researched and deeply emotional portrait of the Great Migration.
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The protagonist of Naomi Hirahara's novels isn't a seasoned police detective or a private investigator — he's a gruff, 72-year-old gardener who lives in the hills above Pasadena, Calif. The Mas Arai character was inspired by Hirahara's father and guides readers into the hidden corners of L.A.'s Japanese-American communities.
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The prolific and perennially controversial celebrity biographer takes a look at the life of a talk show host who doesn't much like to be talked about. Not surprisingly, Kelley's latest bio is entirely unauthorized.
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Elsie Washington, who died last month, is hailed as the Barack Obama of romance writers. Colleagues say she showed that publishing novels with worldly black characters was possible. She established a precedent that influenced the genre over the past 20 years.
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The new film Angels & Demons revolves around a group whose name has become synonymous with shadows and global conspiracy: the Illuminati. But how big — and how bad — are they really?
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In Los Angeles, the financially troubled Museum of Contemporary Art gets a bailout from arts patron Eli Broad. He'll match donor funding dollar-for-dollar up to $15 million and will also give MOCA $3 million a year for exhibits over the next five years.