After “An American Marriage,” her wildly successful 2018 novel, Tayari Jones signed a contract for her next book to be about a woman grappling with gentrification in modern Atlanta.

She tried to write that story. But it wasn’t doing that “magical thing that lets you know you have art,” she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “It was a good idea. But the book wasn’t booking, as my students say.”

And then 2020 happened. A million Americans died from COVID, including some of Jones’ friends. Then George Floyd was murdered. Protests rocked the country. Jones started to wonder if writing a novel even mattered. And then she got sick with an autoimmune disorder.

She started to write again just to soothe herself.

The new story “kept me company the same way reading a book may keep someone company,” she tells host Kerri Miller. “I loved [main characters] Annie and Niecy. I was eager to see what would become of them. I was delighted with the minor characters. I enjoyed visiting with them — asking them the questions of their heart. And asking the same questions of my own heart.”

The result is “Kin,” Jones newest novel, and by all accounts, this story is doing that “magical thing” that good books do. It’s already an Oprah Book Pick and a New York Times Bestseller.

Jones talks about all of this and more with Miller — including the power of female friends and the grief of family lost and found — on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Tayari Jones is a professor of writing at Emory University and the author of four novels, including “Kin,” her newest book, which was published in February.

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The Science Museum of Minnesota has wowed generations with its dinosaur fossils, including an 80-foot Diplodocus. And tens of thousands of people have visited its other exhibits explaining everything from outer space to the history of race.

But these days, fewer people are visiting.

Like other cultural institutions across the country, the St. Paul museum has struggled to lure people back after the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendance is half of what it was in 2019, forcing the museum to eliminate summer camps, lay off employees and make other cuts.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks about what contributed to the drop in visitors and how the museum is trying to sell more people on its cool collections, current exhibits and educational programming.

Guests:

• Alison Rempel Brown has been the president and CEO of the Science Museum of Minnesota since 2016. She was previously chief of staff at the California Academy of Sciences.

• Colleen Dilenschneider is founder and managing member of IMPACTS Experience, a market research firm that works with cultural organizations, including museums, zoos, aquariums and science centers. She is based in Chicago.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

Want to be an Art Hound? Submit here.

A puppet rock opera returns

Azure Anderson of St. Paul is an artist, musician, and podcaster, and she’s a huge fan of Phantom Chorus Theatre.

They are re-mounting the founders’ 2019 production of “Razia’s Shadow,” a puppet rock opera. The production contains 12 songs by Forgive Durden, performed live, with a new cast of puppet characters ranging in size from two to eight feet.

The show runs April 10–25 at the Hive Collaborative in St. Paul. In-person and live-streamed tickets are available. While not designed as a children’s show, Anderson says the show is recommended for ages six and older due to a few spooky elements; if your child enjoys Tim Burton’s film “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” this show should be a good fit.

Having seen all Phantom Chorus’s productions for the past three years, Anderson raves about them.

Azure says: “The visuals are always incredible. The music's always incredible. And the technical aspect never misses.

— Azure Anderson

Sewing and style at Twin Cities Frocktails

For Hannah Olanrewaju of St. Paul, sewing means community. She’s looking forward to Twin Cities Frocktails, an evening event where attendees are invited (though not required) to wear clothes they made themselves.

This year’s theme is “Making Through the Decades.” Frocktails takes place 6 to 10 p.m., Saturday, April 11 at Steady Pour in Minneapolis.

Hannah describes the vibe of the first Frocktails in 2024.

Hannah says: There's something so uniquely wonderful about being in a room with people who've made at least one part of their outfit and can really speak the same language as you do. And so, I remember walking around with my bingo sheet and getting to know people and where they're from.

They're asking you about your outfit, and you're asking them about their outfit. And so by the end of the night, you're saying goodbye to all these people that you've really never met before, but now, you’re finding ways to keep in touch.

I think that's something that's so beautiful about Frocktails and about sewing, specifically, that I don't think I've been able to find anywhere else.

— Hannah Olanrewaju

Poetry and community in Rochester

John Sievers is a trombonist from Rochester, but tonight, he’s looking forward to an event that celebrates poetry. The Southeastern Minnesota Poets will hold their next Bright Lights Poetry Night tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the historic Chateau Theatre.

The theme of tonight’s reading is “Emergence.”

John says: This event is really a community event that is encouraging people to come together as people who are interested in language and words and poetry.

And I just love the fact that I can hear people from my community sharing their deep thoughts about important themes in today's society.

— John Sievers

In the face of heightened immigration enforcement earlier this year, Minnesotans showed up for one another, organizing marches, coordinating food drop-offs and donation drives and offering strangers and loved ones their support. A new coloring book captures that Minnesota spirit.

Mariusz Kujawski, executive director of the St. Paul Art Collective, told Morning Edition the effort was born from a monthly sketch night program and food drive.

“Some people did make beautiful paintings for kids to hang in their homes. And some people didn't make a painting; they just made outlines. And I said, Well, this is like a coloring page. Why don't we make more of those coloring pages?” Kujawski explained. The “idea was to just create something welcoming and accessible for kids and families, something that reminds them of community being there, neighbors organizing.”

More than 100 local artists and students contributed pages to the coloring book, “Draw Together.” The images range from monarchs to a raccoon with birthday cakes, hearts and “love” written in several languages, and a family of loons with the words “You belong here” floating above.

There's a free PDF download available online, or paper copies are available at St. Paul art store Wet Paint and on Amazon, where it ranks at No. 1 as the new release in Children's Drawing Books as of Wednesday afternoon.

The book’s release comes on the cusp of the Spring St. Paul Art Crawl, which begins Friday and runs for three weekends.

Listen to the conversation by clicking the player button above.

Adrionna Otis first started making beadwork last year. The 16-year-old says her first project — a pair of earrings she made with her sister's help — took about three hours from start to finish.

“Immediately, it clicked for me,” she said. Her latest pair of earrings emulates a blooming flower. She used white beads in a circular pattern with two rows of gold beads as the edging.

Indigenous beadwork uses fine glass seed beads often sewn onto leather or cloth for jewelry, bags, clothing and other items. Otis says she mainly beads earrings, but sometimes she will venture into other projects, like a beaded phone strap.

“That one took me a couple days, but it wasn't extremely hard,” Otis said.

For Otis, creating wearable items helps her feel more connected to her Ojibwe identity and culture.

She recently walked the runway in a fashion show in northern Minnesota at Fortune Bay Resort Casino, located near Lake Vermillion. The show, titled Miskwaa Niigaan, or “Red Future,” showcased Native youth and their creations.

Bois Forte Band of Lake Superior Chippewa citizen Deanna Drift is the American Indian education coordinator for the St. Louis County Schools, a geographically large school district in northeastern Minnesota.

Drift says the event brought together students from across the district and the Bois Forte Band’s education and employment training program. She, alongside other organizers, put the show together to “uplift youth” through self-expression of their Native identity.

“I think the main goal behind it was just to instill self-esteem and pride in who they are,” Drift said.

Exploring identity

The students shared their beadwork, ribbon skirts and regalia while a crowd of parents and community members filled the ballroom in support.

Otis says it was her first time participating in an event like the fashion show. She was nervous backstage, but she also felt excited. She traveled from the Cloquet area, where she attends South Ridge School, for the occasion.

“It makes me feel really happy to be able to be here with other people who might even be in the same boat as I am,” said Otis.

She describes herself as having mixed heritage and someone who is “white presenting.”

Otis was adopted by a family from the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Her family of origin is from the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.

“Even though [I’m] adopted into a Native American family, it's been hard to figure out stuff about myself and just what my culture really is,” she said.

And it was through art and fashion that she found a sense of belonging after feeling uncertain of her identity when she was younger.

Otis has always been interested in art and fashion, and she says beadwork and exploring different forms of creativity, like making ribbon skirts, have allowed her to explore her Native identity.

Ribbon skirts are traditional handmade garments made from fabric adorned with ribbon designs and are typically worn during ceremonies or celebratory gatherings in tribal communities.

“Beading, sewing — it just really helps me feel a lot more connected,” Otis said.

Drift says she’s observed Otis having an interest in her culture — she’s taking an Ojibwe language class at her school and participates in cultural activity workshops. She recently made a floral ribbon skirt with red and black satin ribbons through a cultural workshop offered through her school, which she wore to the fashion show.

“As mentors, we look at what interests them and then really try to make that happen for them,” Drift said.

Busy parent Earl Otis attended the show. He enjoys seeing his daughter embrace beadwork and sewing.

“I like seeing her doing that a lot,” he said. “It's nice to see her get more involved now.”

Inspiring others

Before the lights dimmed to begin the show, Otis shared backstage that she wanted to inspire others to embrace their identities just as she had.

“I'm hoping I can make other people feel better about themselves, especially if there's anyone who feels the same way as me sitting in the audience,” Otis said.

Music produced by local Native artists played during the event as youth were called onto the stage one by one to show off their creations. The announcer called the powwow regalia category first.

Otis wore her ribbon skirt and earrings on the stage. She says she initially felt embarrassed, but that feeling went away after the first few moments of standing in front of everyone. She walked down the runway with a confident smile on her face.

Afterward, Otis shared how she felt about being on stage. She says she loved being able to be a part of the experience and to be able to share that experience with fellow students who were feeling nervous as she had been before the show.

She even felt that she may have inspired those that were in the audience.

“I definitely felt like everybody was appreciating my work, and just happy that I was there — just like I was happy all of them were there,” Otis said.

Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.

The 45th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, also known as MSPIFF, starts Tuesday night and runs through April 19. More than 200 films will screen in cinemas across the Twin Cities metro area.

Films range from Minnesota-made — including documentaries “Medicine Ball” by Leya Hale, “The Wild West Bank Sound” by Kevin Dragseth and “Uncle Roy” by Keri Pickett — to international films such as “Calle Málaga” out of Morocco, “Comparsa” out of Guatemala and “Becoming Human” out of Cambodia.

The festival also does educational programming about the film industry and panels with film veterans and newcomers, including an April 12 event with cinematographer Dean Cundey (“Halloween,” “Back to the Future,” “Jurassic Park”).

Also on the schedule: an April 18 post-screening discussion with AJ Schnack, who made “Escalation,” a nonfiction short that documents how law enforcement targeted journalists covering protests, from the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd to the ICE Operation Metro Surge.

Here are a few more picks from MPR.

‘Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story’

6:45 p.m. and 6:50 p.m. screenings on April 8

The festival opens at 6:45 p.m. Wednesday with the film “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” a new documentary by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley about the comedian who grew up in Duluth, which Bamford calls “a little Monaco, a tiny San Francisco.”

The documentary uses interviews with fellow comedians (Tig Notaro, Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Zach Galifianakis), her father (who has since died) and her sister, as well as archival photography and footage from her childhood in Duluth and her career in stand-up, to create an even fuller picture of Bamford, who is known for her candor.

We see how Bamford developed a love for performance in her youth and developed a singular approach to comedy, including impressions (of her mother, sister and a rotating cast of characters from her life) and explorations of then-taboo subjects of mental health.

Bamford, who is based in Los Angeles, is considered one of the first comics to center her mental health — bipolar disorder, depression, OCD and suicidal ideation — and help make these topics mainstream. The documentary takes a deeper dive into how these conditions manifested in childhood, and some of the parallel experiences of her mother, who died during the pandemic.

“I hope that it is in some way helpful to anybody else who's following an artistic path or whatever life path, where you feel kind of that hopelessness, or saying, ‘Oh, I can't do it because of this thing that is a part of my personality or my physical makeup,’” Bamford says. “It was a great honor to be asked. Judd is a super fan of comedy. He loves what he loves, and I am so grateful to be a part of that umbrella.”

Bamford and Brinkley will be in attendance for a Q&A after the screenings.

‘Woman Land’

7:10 pm April 15 and 6:55 pm April 18 as part of the “Shorts: Labor & Love” programming

Local filmmaker Yasmin Yassin created a coming-of-age film about two Somali sisters in Minneapolis who start a secret matchmaking business. The film short navigates tradition and rebellion, and grew out of a digital zine of the same name.

“I grew up in a household that was very matriarchal, and so I wanted to kind of reflect that a little bit,” Yassin told MPR News in March. “I really wanted to play on that idea of the strength and joy, but also, the funny power of the women in our culture.”

In addition to the screenings, on April 17 the festival will host “Woman Land Club,” a celebration of the film and the local cast, crew and community who made it, described as “a night of girlhood filled with charms, discussion and special drinks.”

‘The Travel Companion’

7:10 p.m. April 14 and 9:20 p.m. April 16

Co-directed by Travis Wood and Alex Mallis, “The Travel Companion” brings a humorous look at assessing your life in your 30s.

The film follows Simon, a struggling documentarian in his 30s who has benefited from being the “travel companion” of his friend Bruce, who works for an airline, allowing Simon to travel the world for free. But when his friend begins dating a different filmmaker, Simon becomes both jealous of the more successful artist now in his orbit and fearful that he might lose his airline benefits.

“The Travel Companion” debuted last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, but its Minnesota premiere at MSPIFF is poignant, as Minneapolis is director Travis Wood’s hometown.

After its screenings at MSPIFF, “The Travel Companion” will have additional runs at theaters across Minnesota in the coming weeks and months, including at Pop’s Art Theater in Rochester in May.

‘Ruunta’

1:55 p.m. April 19, presented as art of a short films collection

Following Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Minneapolis during the 2024 election campaign, producer Ryan Stopera and director Abdilatif Hassen wanted to respond to the then-senator’s claims of Minneapolis being “overrun with crime.”

“I went home and started writing,” Stopera said after hearing Vance’s comment.

Stopera says he “started writing an outline of a story that was rooted in Lake Street in south Minneapolis, that embraced the nuance of our community, and immediately reached out to Abdilatif.”

In collaboration with other Minneapolis-based filmmakers, Stopera and Hassen created “Ruunta.” The short film follows a young Somali man who, after witnessing a crime, comes into the possession of a designer purse filled with money.

What follows is a slice of life series of vignettes, showing the young man interacting with members in his Lake Street community — interactions that indirectly influence his decision on what to do with the purse.

Minnesota’s own Chris Tungseth, the construction worker from Fergus Falls, has hammered his way into the top 11 of the reality TV show “American Idol.” That’s after what some at home considered Tungseth’s rocky performance of Edwin McCain’s song “I’ll Be.”

Monday night’s theme was “judge’s choice” for the live show. “American Idol” judges Carrie Underwood, Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan each chose a song for contestants to perform. But their choices were unknown to the contestants.

Tungseth’s options were the Black Crowes’ “She Talks to Angels,” Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” and Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be.”

Ultimately, Tungseth chose the latter after admitting he had never heard of the other two songs. But his lack of stage experience was almost his undoing. Although he grew up singing in church, it was obvious Tungseth faltered at times.

It was later revealed that Underwood had been the judge who had selected “I’ll Be” for Tungseth.

“I’m going to be super honest. I felt like there were some really magical moments in there,” said Underwood, who has been one of Tungseth’s greatest supporters this season. “And I felt like there were a few not-so-great moments.”

But, fellow judge Luke Bryan’s take was quite the opposite.

“Great job,” Bryan said. “The soul in your voice is just so good.”

Audience members sided with Bryan and in the end voted Tungseth into top 11 of the live show. Tungseth was the first to be told he had passed muster and appeared gobsmacked.

Monday’s episode started with the resolution of a cliffhanger. The field was supposed to be whittled down to the top 12 competitors the week prior. But competition got so heated with an overwhelming amount of audience members voting online and through text that host Ryan Seacrest told viewers producers needed an extra week to tally the results properly.

One of Tungseth’s friends signed him up for “American Idol” without telling him. Then to prepare for auditions, he performed locally at open mic nights and restaurants.

Tungseth has connected with viewers this season by sharing personal challenges he’s faced. His father passed from leukemia in 2023 and his mother is currently living in a nursing home because of multiple sclerosis.

Viewers will have to tune in next Monday to see Tungseth continue representing Minnesota on the world’s stage.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Charlotte Glover of Parnassus Books and Gifts in Ketchikan, Alaska, recommends a novel that will immerse you deeply in the Pacific Northwest.

She appreciates the lovely characters, focus on nature, and beautiful writing of Eileen Garvin’s novel “Crow Talk.” Garvin gained national attention for her novel “The Music of Bees,” and her new novel “Bumblebee Season” comes out April 21.

For Glover, it was the mention of crows in the title that first drew her to “Crow Talk”: crows and ravens are of huge importance across the Pacific Northwest, from her bookstore’s location in the Alaskan panhandle to the novel’s setting in the Hood River area of Oregon.

The story follows Frankie, an ornithologist who has retreated to a small family cabin by a lake to mourn the loss of her father and figure out a path to finish her dissertation on spotted owls. It’s autumn, and the only other residents are a family, Anne and Tim and their five-year-old autistic son, who isn't speaking.

As Glover explains, these lonely, wayward characters find each other and converge over caring for a baby crow. Frankie and Anne forge a friendship as they care for both the bird and the boy.

“Nature is a huge character in this book,” says Glover, “It’s a book that you can touch, smell, feel, taste, and hear. That's always what I'm looking for in a book is an immersive experience.”

Across galleries, stages and screens, this week’s lineup approaches art as both archive and active system — work that holds history while also testing it against the present. From river clay to protest prints to restructured captions, these projects are less about documentation than about how documentation itself is shaped, translated and put to use.

'[opera captions]' at Nautilus Music Theater in St. Paul — April 3–6

This hybrid performance shifts captions from support to structure, treating accessibility as the core aesthetic choice. Created by Jay Afrisando and directed by Sequoia Hauck, the work brings together music, film and poetry to examine how sound is experienced across hearing differences, with captions functioning as active elements that mediate, interrupt and expand the performance.

Jeremy Jewell at Two Fathoms Brewing in Winona — April 4

Jewell’s work leans on a deliberate informality, a folk-rock sensibility that reads as lived rather than staged. Known for incorporating family into his sets and operating within a distinctly regional DIY framework, he reflects a strand of Minnesota music oriented toward intimacy over polish, where the boundary between performance and everyday life remains intentionally porous.

'Suffs' at Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis — April 7–12

Arriving with Tony-winning momentum, this touring production revisits the American suffrage movement with attention to both internal conflict and collective achievement. Shaina Taub’s score draws on the structure of the political musical while foregrounding figures such as Alice Paul and Ida B. Wells, and with Minnesota-raised Victoria Pekel in the cast, the production lands as both national history and local connection.

Studio Ghibli Series at The Parkway Theater in Minneapolis — Saturdays in April

The Parkway’s annual Ghibli series operates as both repertory programming and a seasonal recalibration, returning audiences to Hayao Miyazaki’s layered explorations of environment and spirituality. With films like “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away,” the run underscores animation’s narrative range and the collective experience of revisiting work that resists urgency in favor of sustained attention.

'Valley Pottery: 2,000 Years And Deep Mapping' at ArtReach St. Croix in Stillwater — Through May 9

A paired exhibition frames the St. Croix River Valley as both archive and ongoing studio, tracing ceramics from ancient Indigenous traditions into contemporary practice. “Valley Pottery: 2,000 Years” brings together archaeological material from the Science Museum of Minnesota with new work by regional potters, while “Deep Mapping” carries that continuity into language and geography through Greg Seitz’s river maps and Marlena Myles’ Dakota cartography.

'Resilience' at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis —Through May 16

Printmaking here functions less as a medium than as a civic tool, with curator Maria Cristina Tavera assembling artists who treat ink and paper as vehicles for response. From Narsiso Martinez’s large-scale tributes to farmworkers to a gallery shaped by protest artifacts connected to Operation Metro Surge, “Resilience” positions the Twin Cities as a site where political urgency and artistic production remain closely aligned.

Taken together, these events return to a shared question: how art carries material forward — through clay, ink, sound or story — without allowing it to resolve into something fixed or inert.

At the start of the year, Anthony Palmini was taken down by a terrible cold — the kind that made him feel as if there were a pair of hands squeezing his throat whenever he tried to speak. The sickness would be disruptive for most. But for Palmini, a rising audiobook narrating star, it was nearly disastrous.

Palmini, a Bronx native who's living what he calls "a regular life" in New York's Westchester County suburbs, has become a leading figure in the "romantasy" audio publishing world. That's the literature genre combining romance (think fewer beefy Fabio-types and more strong female leads) with fantasy (replete with dragons, vampires and magic-wielding faeries).

He's the voice of some of the genre's most famous MMCs: aka male main characters, aka the internet's favorite "book boyfriends." His deep, resonant voice — especially as Rhysand in the spicy megahit series "A Court of Thorns and Roses" by Sarah J. Maas, and Kingfisher in the breakout "Fae & Alchemy" series by Callie Hart — makes fans swoon and provides fodder for memes.

But when he was sick, he said: "I had all these projects ready to go and my voice was gone for two weeks. And then the week after that, when I tried to record, it was just like I couldn't do anything," Palmini told NPR during a recent interview.

He nearly missed deadlines for six new book projects.

"Before I would just brush it off, and now it's like, 'Oh no, this is a part of my job!'" he said, gesturing to his throat.

It's a scary situation he doesn't want to find himself in again. Because these days, he's busier than ever. Last year, he recorded more than 50 book titles. This year, he's on track to double that.

A niche celebrity is born

Success has been hard-earned for the 44-year-old. And he's been thrilled by the love he's received from romantasy fans who are obsessed with his baritone voice. It's been a decades-long grind.

"I started out wanting to just act, and then that turned into editing and directing. And I've always liked comedy, so stand up comedy and sketch was always in the back of my mind. And being in New York, why not try that out? And so I did that for a while," Palmini said.

He got his first voiceover job by accident around 2015, recording placeholder vocals for an MTV spot when he worked there as a show editor. The bosses decided to keep his voice for the actual broadcast.

But the circuitous journey to admittedly niche celebrity makes perfect sense in retrospect.

As a kid, Palmini was obsessed with comic books. He'd read the panels out loud, coming up with distinct sounds for the villains, heroes and comic relief in the pages. His father, Antonio Palmini, inspired him to work on his vocal range.

"He dreamed of being a radio host," the younger Palmini recalled. "He would practice doing sports recaps using a tape recorder."

Eventually, they shared the tape recorder. "He would say, 'Go, do your own radio show.'" He still has those cassette tapes.

When he was a teenager, Palmini got his first job at a Blockbuster video store. He loved answering the phone, and a coworker had noticed that when Palmini was "super relaxed," he sounded — well, different. "There's like a voice that's coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy," he said, recalling his friend's words.

From then on, whenever customers called, Palmini would put on the voice. He honed it, making small modifications to get it just right.

"Because the phone felt like a microphone, and so every time I would pick up people would be like, 'Whoa, who is this?'" he said.

Women would come into the store expecting to find a tall, burly grown man. Instead they'd find a scrawny, nerdy teenage boy, he said, laughing.

Nearly 30 years later, fans are still surprised by a seeming mismatch between Palmini's physical appearance and the gravelly voice he puts on for his heartthrob characters. Palmini is slender and compact, 5 feet 9 inches, with a sweet disposition.

Compare that to the characters he plays: usually centuries-old faeries, who tower over their love interests at well over 7 feet. They're brooding, morally gray and often wield dark shadow powers. (In the romantasy world, it's a classic archetype: a "shadow daddy.")

Romantasy ‘continues to win the day’

Romantasy is one of the fastest-growing literary genres in the world. Book sales in the U.S. alone reached 33.1 million in 2025, growing 3 percent compared to the previous year, according to Brenna Connor, a book industry analyst at Circana, which tracks consumer spending. That's on top of the genre's double-digit growth in both 2023 and 2024.

The thirst for audio versions of the books is also proving to be a powerful market force. Audiobook sales revenue topped $2.22 billion in 2024, 13 percent over the previous year, the Audio Publishers Association's most recent annual survey found. The biggest gains were seen in romance, up by 30 percent, and science fiction/fantasy, up by 21 percent.

"On a genre basis, romantasy continues to win the day," Sean McManus, president of the Audio Publishers Association, told NPR in December.

Another trend boosting both book and audio sales is immersive reading: reading the text of the story while also listening to it being performed by professionals.

"It's allowing people to, quite literally, as the name implies, immerse themselves in these books in multiple, multiple ways," Lexi Ayala told NPR.

Ayala and her sister, Nicole Holleman, host a romantasy podcast called Fantasy Fangirls, in which they laugh over the steamiest scenes in the books they're reading. They're also massive fans of Palmini's.

"This man has completely stolen my heart. I will never be the same," Holleman said.

In fact, when the audio version of the second book in the Fae & Alchemy series, Brimstone, was released in November, they made special plans.

"We got ourselves an Airbnb and they had a boom box, so we hit play and we had the audiobook going as we were reading. It was our way of staying at the exact same place as we were reading a book for the very first time together," Ayala said.

The audiobook is 20 hours and 41 minutes long.

Palmini plays the role of the filthy-mouthed Kingfisher, as well as all of the other male characters in the book.

"The way that he elevates audiobook narration is so incredible. It's so much fun to be able to really hear it and read it. And also, just as a reader, I pick up on a lot more, I remember a lot more," Ayala added.

Intimacy is the ‘booby prize’

Jasmine Bina, a brand strategist who studies behavior, trends and culture, has a theory on why these types of books have women of all ages spellbound.

"It's not just the dragons. It's not just the sex. It's justice," she told NPR. Bina posits that these stories are not primarily about desire. They are about vengeance and the heroine's quest for order. Once she asserts that, then she can experience the intimacy that she's seeking — which Bina calls the "booby prize."

Those themes of justice and good triumphing over evil are deeply rewarding for Palmini as an actor, too. The juicy, complicated characters "who go on a hero's journey" are the most fun to play, he said. It's also what he reminds himself to focus on when he's recording an especially graphic sex scene.

Even now, after recording more than 120 racy books across the full "chili pepper spectrum" — that's how people on BookTok rate the level of spiciness in a book — he blushes when talking about steamy lines that have become famous among romantasy readers.

"I get a little embarrassed in the beginning, but then I go, 'Okay, my job is to portray this character sincerely in the scene and the sincerity is spicy.' So you got to go with it and go for it all the way," Palmini said.

Ironically, when he landed the role of Rhysand in GraphicAudio's 2022 dramatized audiobook adaptation, Palmini had no idea what he was getting into. He'd never read romance novels and was clueless about the ACOTAR series' global reach.

Eventually, while Palmini was recording the second book in the series, the director on the project suggested he do some research.

"Just go online. Go on TikTok. Go check out what this book is," she told him. He was flabbergasted by what he found.

In retrospect, he was glad he hadn't done it before the audition. "I think that that would have rattled me," he said.

Instead, he went in without all of that added pressure of knowing the fandom surrounding his character. "I think because I didn't know, I was just like, 'Let me just be truthful.'"

He's trying to take that same attitude moving forward in his own life. His career continues to heat up; he's got 60 new books to record between now and August, he said.

Palmini anticipates the genre becoming even bigger, too. He compares the current clamoring for romantasy-based intellectual property to the comic-book craze that took over film and television for more than a decade.

"I feel like now we're heading into that space where it's just like anything that's romance, if it's good, we're going to turn it into a movie or TV show," Palmini said. That could open new doors for him, ones that have previously been hard to get through.

He added: "It's a great time to be in the genre." And he wants to take advantage of every opportunity.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Six books have been named finalists for the 2026 International Booker Prize. Formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize, this honor is presented annually for a work of fiction that was originally written in a language other than English, then translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland.

In a moment in which international relations are dominating news headlines around the globe, three of these shortlisted novels explore pivotal moments in world history: imperialist Japan-controlled Taiwan in the 1930s, Nazi-era Germany and the 1979 Revolution in Iran.

"With narratives that capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history," author Natasha Brown, chair of this year's International Booker Prize jury, said in a statement.

"While there's heartbreak, brutality, and isolation among these stories, their lasting effect is energizing. Rereading each book, we judges found hope, insight and burning humanity — along with unforgettable characters to whom I'm sure readers will return again and again."

This year's shortlist particularly celebrates female authors and translators: Five of the authors and four of the translators are women.

As well as hailing from four continents, the shortlisted authors and translators come from remarkably diverse professional backgrounds: Taiwan's Yáng Shuāng-zǐ writes manga and video game scripts, and Bulgaria's Rene Karabash is a well-established actor as well as author.

The winning author and translator will be announced on May 19. They will split a prize of £50,000 (about $66,000).

The finalists are:

‘The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran’ by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin

This is a multigenerational tale told by four different family members — first during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, then as the family seeks a new home in West Germany – that takes readers back to Iran, and the Iranian people's struggle to come to a new political and social reality during the Green Revolution of 2009.

In Australia's The Saturday Paper, Rhoda Kwan wrote that “The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran” is "a quietly beautiful exploration of the trauma of losing one's homeland to a savage regime, the novel is testament to how hope and the revolutionary spirit endure in the face of crushing tyranny, how courage cannot be fully stamped out."

‘She Who Remains’ by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel

An independent-minded young woman named Bekja, living in Albania's rural Accursed Mountains, escapes an arranged marriage, reshapes her life and decides to live as a man. That declaration sets off a chain reaction in the community, ultimately separating Bekja from the person she loves the most.

The International Booker Prize judges called “She Who Remains” “an exquisitely written, brilliantly observed story about a young woman in a contemporary Albanian tribal society, and a blood feud that sets off her journey to self-discovery.”

‘The Director’ by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin

This novel is the fictionalized story of real-life Austrian film maker G.W. Pabst, who fled a prominent career in Nazi Germany to make a new life in Hollywood. Due to his ailing mother, however, he returns to his native country, where the regime begins pressuring him to make propaganda.

In The New Yorker, critic David Denby called “The Director” a "complex entertainment—a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura."

‘On Earth As It Is Beneath’ by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan

This is a horror novella set in a remote penal colony in which every full moon, the warden releases the inmates into the wilderness — only to hunt them down. In The New York Times, critic Gabino Iglesias enthused that “On Earth As It Is Beneath” is "a must read for those who like their poetry written in blood."

‘The Witch’ by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump

This novel is the oldest of this year's crop of shortlisted nominees: It was originally published in French in 1996. Its protagonist is Lucie, a not terribly gifted witch, who passes on her familial powers to her own daughters, Maud and Lise. Vulture critic Jasmine Vojdani wrote of “The Witch:” "This is NDiaye at her disquieting best."

‘Taiwan Travelogue’ by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

This novel, which already won the 2024 National Book Award for translated literature, traces a year-long journey through Taiwan by a (fictional) young Japanese novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, a young writer of voracious appetites.

Chizuko has been invited to Taiwan by the Japanese government, which currently controls the island; once there, she meets her Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, who enraptures Chizuko. New York Times reviewer Shahnaz Habib wrote that “Taiwan Travelogue” is "a delightfully slippery novel about how power shapes relationships, and what travel reveals and conceals."

The judges for the 2026 International Booker prize are author Natasha Brown; writer, broadcaster and professor Marcus du Sautoy; translator Sophie Hughes; writer, editor and bookseller Troy Onyango; and novelist and columnist Nilanjana S. Roy.

Copyright 2026, NPR

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order that would undo birthright citizenship. That long-established legal principle was enshrined in the 14th Amendment. In part, it says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens."

In her new book, professor and writer Daisy Hernandez says that legal definition is just one layer of a complicated idea. Citizenship is really about who gets to belong.

“We are citizens of the stories we tell,” she writes. “We belong to the stories we scribe about democracy and authoritarianism, about borders and neighbors, about love and grief and one another.”

Hernandez joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas for a remarkably relevant discussion about her book, “Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth.” She uses her own family’s immigration story as a starting point to examine how class, race, sexism and nationalism all impact who gets to claim U.S. citizenship. She and Miller also talk about how citizenship has evolved over the course of American history, often becoming a proxy for race.

Guest:

• Daisy Hernandez is a writer and a professor at Northwestern University. Her new book is “Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth.” Her previous books include “The Kissing Bug” and a memoir, “A Cup of Water Under My Bed.”

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

Want to be an Art Hound? Submit here.

A rarely staged musical comedy

Christine Sweet, a retired classical music radio host in St. Paul, is looking forward to seeing Minneapolis Musical Theatre’s production of "Grumpy Old Men," a musical adaptation of the 1993 romcom set in Wabasha.

The musical runs April 3–19 at the Conn Theater in Minneapolis.

Christine says: MMT brings us new and rarely performed musicals, digging deep to find forgotten gems and often presenting the local premieres of chosen works, which is the case with this production of “Grumpy Old Men.”

After a hard winter, we could use some belly laughs at the foibles of two lifelong rivals vying through snow and ice-fishing for the attention of their attractive new neighbor.

MMT draws on the Twin Cities' wealth of vocal, instrumental and theatrical talent, and I can’t wait to hear what they do with the soundtrack, which was commercially recorded just two years ago.”

— Christine Sweet

A poetic look at a scientific pioneer

Carolyn Pool, a writer and performer in St. Paul, recommends seeing “Ada Lovelace: Bride of Science,” a new play staged by nimbus theatre.

Daughter of the famed poet Lord Byron, Lovelace (1815-1852) was a mathematical genius who invented the Analytical Engine, a prototype for early computers. Carolyn says this play offers a great way to introduce children to an important historical figure in STEM. This show has sliding scale tickets. It runs April 4–19 at The Crane Theater in northeast Minneapolis.

The play is written by Twin Cities performer Nissa Nordland, who is also the head of the Twin Cities Horror Fest.

Carolyn says: [Nordlund] has a very, very big interest in both science and beauty and poetry. And so this is going to be, yes, a play about a woman in science, and it's going to be poetic, full of beautiful language and stellar performances.

— Carolyn Pool

Continuing a quiltmaker’s legacy

Brie Taralson owns Lykke Books, across the street from the Grand Center for Arts and Culture in New Ulm. She wants people to see the beautiful quiltwork on display in the Grand’s current exhibition, “Picking Up the Piecework: A Legacy of Creativity Through the Lens of Mary Hartten.”

After Hartten, an avid quilter, died, her family gave her fabric and unfinished piecework to be sold to benefit The Grand. This exhibit features quilts that have been made — in a variety of styles — using those pieces, thus continuing Hartten’s legacy. The exhibit runs through April 24.

On Sat. April 10 at 5 p.m., Mary’s son Randy Hartten will give a presentation about “An Unfinished Project,” a printed book of 54 of Mary’s quilt squares. Brie describes that project.

Brie says: What's really neat is you can actually see the “finished side” on one and flip the book over and see exactly how precise she was and how complicated the stitching was on the other side. And so you get a true behind-the-scenes look at how much math and geometry and and precision that was needed to do this well.

[Mary’s children] had this bound, and the the book itself is a piece of art. It's quite literally stitched together of her quilt pieces.

— Brie Taralson

Thousands of musicians make up Minnesota’s deep and wide-ranging music scene: from polka halls to hip-hop studios, basement punk shows to internationally-known classical performers.

An ambitious new project is trying to capture all of it in one place.

The Diverse Emerging Music Organization, or DEMO, has relied on a small staff and many volunteers for years to meet one goal: to collect, digitize and preserve all music released by Minnesota artists.

The archive launched Wednesday and DEMO is throwing a launch party Thursday night to celebrate. DEMO Executive Director Mitch Thompson joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about it.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

For more than a decade, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop has provided creative writing classes to people in Minnesota correctional facilities. That work has led to the creation of a first-of-its-kind national independent press.

Led by an editorial board of both people impacted by the carceral system and those without these experiences, Lost Kite Editions aims to publish writing from across genres and communities.

For more about the project, MPR News host Nina Moini talked with Mike Alberti, executive director of the Minnesota Prison Writing Project, and Zeke Caligiuri, a documentarian and Lost Kite Editions director of archives.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

On April Fool’s Day, 2025, Minnesota bluegrass band The Gillyweeds released their latest album, “Cow House.”

In the year that followed, the band played no local venues and gave no interviews. No videos or photos of the band members — Taylor Farris-Smith, Elizabeth Gregor, Noah Keller, Ryan Keller, Samantha Miller, Georgiana May Norton — appeared online, or anywhere.

Then, on March 15, 2026, on the band’s Facebook page, which had about 60,000 followers, an announcement was made: “We are devastated to confirm that today, just before noon, all six members of The Gillyweeds were killed in a plane crash.”

Music fan Kyle Matteson, who’s been immersed in the local music scene for a quarter century, was distraught.

“Well, that’s terrible,” he remembers thinking. But the sorrow soon turned to puzzlement, as he realized he’d never actually heard of The Gillyweeds. He started searching online for plane crashes.

“I didn't see anything, so it was already not passing a smell test,” Matteson says.

Matteson did not find anything because there was no plane crash, and the Gillyweeds never existed.

A fictional band

“The Gillyweeds are a fictional, satirical band that was created for the narrative purposes of a story I've written called ‘Viridian Skies,’” Todd Pitman tells MPR News. “At no point in time was it intended for anyone to take that fiction or that satire as fact or reality.”

By “story,” Pitman is referring to an ARG, or an alternate reality game. For Pitman, it’s part treasure hunt, part geocaching, and part multimedia storytelling that blends fiction and reality.

Pitman has a creative background — he’s done graphic design for bands including Trampled by Turtles and Hippo Campus, and his redesign for the Minnesota flag was a finalist. He’s designed more than 100 ARGs for his company, TC Treasure.

With “Viridian Skies,” Pitman created narrative clues for a small, committed group of players that led to treasures — fake green gemstones he hid around the Midwest.

The narrative included The Gillyweeds.

Pitman wrote lyrics for several albums and set them to AI-generated music and vocals. He also embedded in the band’s lore inspiration from musicians who died in plane crashes, like Buddy Holly and Otis Redding. He posted the music to Bandcamp and YouTube.

The post about The Gillyweeds’ plane crash was the final clue.

“That fiction did, in fact, end up bleeding into reality, and I've done what I can to sort of stop the misinformation that occurred as a result of that mistake,” Pitman says.

Fake band, real feelings

After the social media post about the death of The Gillyweeds, confusion and backlash ensued. On a March episode of City Cast Twin Cities, a panel including Matteson discussed it.

“I’m legitimately mad,” host Sean McPherson said. “Generally, I'm looking at a person who maybe had a good history, but at this point has fictionalized a tragedy, pulled on my heartstrings and many, many other people’s, for a treasure hunt.”

People who had not signed up to play the game saw the post in their social media feeds without context. The Gillyweeds Facebook page had originally been a page titled “Minnesota,” which Pitman started over a decade ago. It had built up about 60,000 followers.

“I changed the title of that to The Gillyweeds,” Pitman says. “That was probably ill-advised.”

Matteson, who shared his in-real-time sleuthing on Bluesky about The Gillyweeds, says that his main grievance is that Pitman had not clearly identified that this was all part of a game, causing distress for folks who had not consented to play.

Matteson says that whatever Pitman was trying to accomplish “was very poorly executed.”

Pitman had included a disclaimer about the fake band, but it was hard to find.

“I did a poor job of delineating fiction from fact,” Pitman says. “There was a disclaimer on their Facebook page, but it was probably optimistic of me to assume people would click through to find that if they weren't invested in the story.”

What is fiction and what is reality

Colin Agur, an associate professor of emerging media studies at the University of Minnesota, says ARGs create “tight-knit, highly engaged communities.”

“There's a shared sense of what's fiction, what's reality, and what they have to figure out, but outside the community, those signals are often invisible,” Agur says. “They usually depend on players opting in and understanding the rules. What happened here is that one piece of the game escaped into social media, where people who weren't playing encountered it as real.”

Agur expects to see more scenarios like The Gillyweeds as AI-generated “cultural artifacts” become easier and cheaper to create.

“The challenge is not just identifying truth, it's understanding what context we're in, and that becomes really time-consuming and complex sometimes,” Agur says. “In the future, being in the know, it won't just mean knowing facts, it will mean knowing which system or community a piece of information comes from.”

Melanie Hendrickson, a 3rd-grade teacher in Bloomington, was in the know from the beginning as an ardent ARG player who participated in “Viridian Skies,” even traveling to the crash site of Buddy Holly in Iowa to search for a gemstone. Hendrickson had been knowingly listening to the fake band for over a year when the Facebook plane crash post went up.

“I'm sorry that they misread it,” Hendrikson says of onlookers. ”I felt bad for Todd. I'm like, ‘Oh, gosh. People are reading this the wrong way,’ and I get it. If I didn't know about Todd and his hunt, and I saw this post, I'd be like, ‘Oh my goodness.’”

Hendrickson found solace and community in ARGs after the death of her son a few years ago. She hopes the intentions and creativity behind “Viridian Skies” don’t get lost.

“In a world where people are often disconnected, he's creating to get people outside, to get people thinking, to get people working together,” Hendrickson says. “That kind of impact is valuable.”

“Viridian Skies” came to a close when the last green gemstone was found in Camden, Tenn., on Sunday.

Pitman first fell in love with treasure hunting as a kid doing the Pioneer Press medallion treasure hunt, and he’ll keep making new stories, he says. But, he will label content more distinctly as fiction, he says, though he hasn’t figured out quite what that looks like yet.

“I'm not going to stop probing this kind of interesting space between narrative and real life,” Pitman says. “It's about giving people these experiences that, if executed properly, can be remembered for a lifetime.”

What began as a song about a storm has taken on new meaning: Sallyforth’s new single “Clover” now echoes the tension in the Twin Cities amid an immigration enforcement surge.

The thunderstorm that sparked the song hit last summer. Singer and guitar player Emma Rothwell can still picture the aftermath.

"There were like tornado sirens and green skies,” she said. “It was kind of crazy."

Singer and fiddler Hattie Peach remembers the air felt “static.”

"Dark blue clouds roll in and the energy in the air is just shifted because something's about to come," she said. "I think that's kind of the vibe that we're conjuring in this song."

To capture that feeling, they leaned into a drone-like violin and cello arrangement that echoes the eerie quiet between storm sirens.

But they never anticipated the song would take on another meaning after months of fear and violence in the Twin Cities.

"It really is kind of that reckoning of all this energy and chaos that can come through,” she said. “To walk around a neighborhood, or to just take in your surroundings after something like that can happen and see the destruction, but also that things are still whole is something that has honestly taken on a new meaning within these past months.”

“It's charged, and I feel like that speaks to this moment that we're in now, too,” Peach said.

After months of rehearsing “Clover,” Peach said it has grown into something they carry with them as they continue to answer fearful times with their joy for music.

"We've been through so much in the past few months that this one feels particularly just sweet. Maybe bittersweet is a better word for it,” Peach said. “It also I really think feels hopeful."

For Rothwell, the song has become something she returns to in difficult moments.

That approach reflects how the band first came together.

Sallyforth has been making music since 2023.

Rothwell and Peach, who were freshman roommates in Duluth, reconnected a few years after graduating to make music, later linking up with Oliver Gerber on lead guitar, Dylan Hilliker on drums and Daisy Forester on bass and cello. Rothwell also performs solo as Emma Jeanne, and Peach plays with her family ensemble, The Penny Peaches.

Nearly every member of the band was going through a breakup when they began playing, setting a foundation of emotional vulnerability.

“It was fun to come together and kind of transform those feelings at that moment into something that was tangible, like a song, and that's funny to look back on now,” Peach said.

“Clover” will be the second single since their EP “Memento Mori.” Their first was “Tightrope,” which they gave to a mutual aid compilation project.

“Clover seeds, they're just so symbolic. You're literally sowing the seeds of your own luck,” Rothwell said.

“That's kind of also kind of emblematic of the band. You put down these thoughts, words, ideas, and you share them with people. And it might take a long time for that to come to fruition...but I think that's kind of special.”

“Clover” by Sallyforth is out today.

Owamni — the James Beard Award-winning Indigenous restaurant in Minneapolis co-founded by chef Sean Sherman — is evolving.

Not only is it moving into the Guthrie Theater overlooking the Mississippi River this spring — but it will also take a new name: Indígena by Owamni.

The restaurant continues to operate under Sherman’s nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or NATIFS, which works to reclaim and restore Indigenous health and foodways.

Sherman says the name change, announced Tuesday, is about growth, not reinvention.

“It’s just an evolution of what we are,” he told MPR News. “We didn’t want people to have exactly the same expectations, to expect it to be exactly the same, because it’s not going to be — it’s going to be something bigger. It’s going to be something broader.”

Sherman explained the name Indígena — pronounced “in-DEE-hay-na” — draws from the Spanish word for Indigenous and references its Latin root meaning “born of the land.”

He said the name is a way to reach across colonial borders — an acknowledgment that Indigenous peoples in North America share a history in common.

“While English and Spanish are colonial languages, they are also bridge languages that allow Indigenous communities across Turtle Island to connect, exchange knowledge and share culinary traditions,” Sherman said.

The sentiment expressed by the name change carries a particular weight in the wake of immigration enforcement operations that shook communities across Minnesota. Sherman said the new name is an act of solidarity.

“Indigenous peoples have always been here,” Sherman said. “These colonial lines have crossed us.”

The menu will reflect the new name. Sherman noted that Indígena will build on culinary traditions already central to Owamni’s kitchen — corn processed using nixtamal, masa, handmade tortillas — foods that span Indigenous communities from Mexico to the Great Lakes.

“We’ve always done that work,” he said.

Indígena will also offer steaks, and larger cuts of game such as bison, elk, and venison. And it will include a full oyster bar and expanded seafood offerings.

The new space — announced last fall — is no small upgrade. With 204 indoor seats and roughly 100 more on the patio, it’s double the size of Owamni’s original location — a move Sherman says was overdue.

“We probably outgrew the original space from the day we opened,” Sherman said.

Chef Joseph Shawana, a friend and former board member of Sherman’s non-profit NATIFS, will join as chef in residence for the first three months. The new restaurant also anticipates adding about 50 employees, for a staff of 150.

The new restaurant is expected to open in late spring.

Bruce Springsteen was in a defiant but upbeat mood as he returned Tuesday night to the “Streets of Minneapolis" to launch his latest U.S. tour, denouncing the Trump administration's immigration crackdown in the city and opening with a not-so-veiled salvo against the war in Iran

Springsteen kicked off his “Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour” at the packed Target Center with a show that lasted just shy of three hours, with no intermission. He previously honored the city’s residents in song for their courage in standing up against the estimated 3,000 federal officers that President Donald Trump’s administration sent in what it called its largest immigration enforcement action anywhere in the country.

“We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals," Springsteen said. "Democracy, our Constitution and our sacred American promise, the America that I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years, that’s been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration.”

The Boss then asked the crowd to join “in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over and peace over ... ” before exploding into a thunderous version of “War," a song he has sung since war clouds loomed over the Reagan administration.

After Springsteen and the E Street Band launched into “Born in the U.S.A.” and a few other fan favorites, he stood alone at center stage with just a quiet accompaniment for “Streets of Minneapolis," a song he penned in January amid the nationwide outcry over the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers. Thousands of audience members held their lit-up phones aloft in tribute.

After E Streeters including Steve Van Zandt and Max Weinberg joined in, Springsteen led fans in four chants of the song's signature line, “ICE Out Now,” as the house lights came up.

Springsteen played a solo version of “Streets of Minneapolis" Saturday during the national flagship “No Kings” rally at the state Capitol in St. Paul. On Tuesday night, he repeated his statement: “The solidarity of the people of Minneapolis, of Minnesota, was an inspiration to the entire country.”

“We’ll take our stand for this land/And the stranger in our midst/We’ll remember the names of those who died/On the streets of Minneapolis,” he sang.

Springsteen later delivered a soliloquy lamenting the state of the country and the world, using it as a lead-in to “My City of Ruins.”

There's no love lost between Springsteen and Trump, who have long feuded. During his European tour last year, Springsteen slammed the Trump administration as a “rogue government” of people who have “no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.”

Trump, in turn, has called Springsteen a “dried-out prune of a rocker.” In a social media post, the president once wrote, “Never liked him, never liked his music or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — just a pushy, obnoxious JERK,” he wrote on social media.

The lights went violet as Springsteen and the E Streeters performed Prince's “Purple Rain.” Tom Morello delivered a searing rendition of the late Minneapolis-born superstar's concluding guitar solo.

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The show ended with Springsteen again honoring Pretti and Good. Before beginning “Chimes of Freedom,” he told the audience:

“This is a tour that was not planned. We’re here tonight because we need to steal your hope and your strength. And we wanted to bring some hope and some strength to you. I hope we did.”

Springsteen told a New York City audience last week, during a 30th anniversary celebration for the independent news program “Democracy Now!,” that his tour will head next to Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, “two other cities where they had to deal with ICE, ICE’s terror.” It ends May 27 in Washington, D.C., where he said he’ll have a few choice words for the White House.

Becky Stunc, 75, came to Minneapolis from Sandpoint, Idaho. “I really want to make my voice known for what Bruce represents,” she said. "And our country.”

Stunc said she found “Streets of Minneapolis" especially moving, with its reference to the spots where Good and Pretti fell as “where mercy should have stood.”

Peter Somers, 46, of Rochester, Minnesota, brought his 11-year-old son, Jack, saying he was glad that Springsteen was "standing up with people for America and democracy.”

“He’s a legend,” Somers said. “And it’s Jack’s first concert ever. What better first concert to ever have than Springsteen?”

A construction worker from Fergus Falls is still hanging on as one of the top 14 contestants on the reality TV show “American Idol.”

Chris Tungseth, 27, learned on Monday night’s show that he advanced out of the top 20. But whether Tungseth made the next cut, to remain in the top 12, was still an open question, as a record number of viewer votes required extra-careful counting, said host Ryan Seacrest.

At a watch party Monday at Outstate Brewing Company in Fergus Falls, fans cheered Tungseth on.

“There’s this aura that he has, and he’s such a positive, good person. He’s a light,” said Pat Lundberg, co-owner and chief executive of Outstate Brewing Company, where Tungseth has performed. “And I think that light is shining amongst, you know, this huge competition and stellar singers, and he’s one of them.”

Lee Solberg was also there at the watch party to root for Tungseth. She was not impressed with Seacrest’s announcement that viewers would need to tune in for the next show to see who will be eliminated.

“That was really rude to make us wait till next week,” she said. “That was so silly, but we’re grateful to watch him [Tungseth] and cheer him on every chance that we can get.”

Monday’s show featured performances of songs of faith. In the final performance of the night, Tungseth sang Cody Johnson’s “By Your Grace.”

Tungseth said he grew up singing in his church choir. One of his friends signed him up for the show without telling him.

Throughout the season, Tungseth shared many personal challenges he’s faced, which viewers have connected with. Tungseth’s father died in 2023 from leukemia and his mother is currently living in a nursing home because of multiple sclerosis.

Earlier this month, Tungseth told MPR News he was hesitant to share those parts of his life publicly on “American Idol.”

“I never wanted to use the tragedy in my life to, you know, necessarily help me with my career,” he said. “That was one thing that I guess I was fearful of.”

This week’s lineup leans less on spectacle than on structure—who gets to speak, who gets recorded and how stories move through time. Across stages, galleries and even Wikipedia pages, these events track the systems that shape cultural memory, from youth authorship to institutional visibility.

Blues Night: Cornbread Harris at Sacred Heart Music Center in Duluth — March 27

At 98, Cornbread Harris plays less like a legacy act than a living throughline in Minnesota music history, connecting early rock and roll to present-day blues traditions. This Duluth performance, paired with a talk by biographer Andrea Swensson, frames his career not just as longevity but as influence, tracing a lineage that runs through Twin Cities clubs and into the national sound.

‘The Welkin’ at Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul — Through March 29

Lucy Kirkwood’s “The Welkin” enters its final weekend with a premise that feels pointedly current: who gets believed, and by whom. Set in 1759 but circling questions of authority and gendered judgment, this production by Frank Theatre leans into the friction between collective decision-making and individual truth, with direction by Wendy Knox keeping the moral spectacle anchored in lived experience.

‘Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon’ at Macalester College in St. Paul — March 28

Part workshop, part corrective, the Art+Feminism Edit-A-Thon treats Wikipedia as a site of cultural repair, addressing the long-standing gender gap in who gets documented and how. Hosted at Macalester, the event connects local participation to a global effort that has reshaped thousands of entries since 2014, making visible the labor behind representation.

‘Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night’ at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — March 28–Aug. 30

Christine Sun Kim’s first major survey arrives at the Walker with a conceptual clarity that reframes sound as social and political rather than purely auditory. Working across drawing, video and installation, Kim channels her experience as a deaf artist into sharp, often wry meditations on language and power, expanding how audiences understand both communication and access.

‘Be Heard Youth Poetry Slam Final’ at Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis — March 28

The final bout of the Be Heard Youth Poetry Slam brings months of writing and competition onto a single stage, where teen poets compress personal and collective stakes into performance. Organized by TruArtSpeaks, the event situates youth voice within Minnesota’s literary ecosystem, positioning spoken word as both artistic practice and civic expression.

‘The Choreography’ at Rochester Art Center in Rochester — Through March 2027

Alexandra Beaumont’s textile-driven practice treats movement as both subject and structure, folding dance into fabric in ways that read as personal and archival at once. “The Choreography” brings together works from her “Techniques for Ecstasy” series alongside a new large-scale installation, using the Rochester Art Center as a space where embodiment and material memory accumulate over time.

Taken together, they sketch a Twin Cities arts scene defined less by finished work than by ongoing process—revision, performance and the quiet work of being heard.

The first essay in Joan Didion’s famous collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is an odd bit of true crime writing titled “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It covers the case of Lucille Miller, a “housewife’ who was accused of killing her husband in 1964 and convicted in 1965 — and includes Didion's signature blend of smart, beautiful prose and deadpan disdain.

Didion describes San Bernadino County, Calif., where the murder took place as, among other things, “the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers' school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

One of these ambitionless girls, Didion implies, is Lucille Miller, who named her eldest daughter Debra (Debbie for short). In 1964, Debbie was a 14-year-old facing the death of her father and the imminent loss of her mother. Debra Miller has now published her own book “The Most Wonderful Terrible Person: A Memoir of Murder in the Golden State” with She Writes Press, a hybrid publisher.

Miller opens her memoir with a reflection on her unsolicited relationship with Didion. Miller found it offensive and unsympathetic, writing: “She taught her children to be offended, too, and I hated the essay until I had enough hindsight to see it through new eyes many years later.”

Indeed, it is likely this distinction — Miller being related to the subject of one of the most famous literary essayists' essays — that will prompt many people to pick up the book, although those looking for a Didionesque narrative will be disappointed, as there is not an ounce of cynicism in it.

Instead, “The Most Wonderful Terrible Person” is a deeply sincere, if sometimes jumbled, reckoning with a life gone off its already rickety rails. Miller's home life before her father's death and her mother's imprisonment was far from picture perfect. Born in Guam where her father, then a military dentist, was stationed, Miller's parents first relocated to Japan and then to Oregon before finally moving to Southern California.

One disturbing anecdote from those early years involves a crying 5-year-old Miller telling her father that her beloved dog, Shep, was too enthusiastic and knocked her down; “Out of ‘love for me,’” Miller writes, “my father gets his shotgun, takes Shep out back, and shoots him… I understood that something awful happened to Shep and it was my fault.”

Both of Miller's parents were physically abusive — and their parents, she learns, were too — but where her father was largely emotionally distant, her mother was more unpredictable with her affections. Lucille ran hot and cold, sometimes telling her daughter that she preferred raising her younger siblings because they were boys, and other times taking her out on shopping sprees and lavishing her with affection.

The defining event of Miller's youth, though, is her father's death and her mother's trial and imprisonment. The kids weren't allowed to see their mother for a while after she first went to jail, and when they finally did and asked her when they'd all be able to go home, she told them: “As soon as this is all over.”

“‘This,’” Miller writes, “came to mean a lot of things, the unspoken things. That day, 'this' meant legal proceedings. Later, it meant the allegation of murder, and later still, a trial. Those abstractions didn't mean anything to us yet. Each 'this' was a component unto itself. 'This' went on and on. It was easier not to call anything by its name, which made it too real, too unbearable. This was momentary, doable. Anybody could do this for a while.”

Not talking about what was really going on became, or perhaps already had been, a pattern in the family.

Miller writes about the events that followed: how she and her brothers helped smuggle drugs, alcohol, and makeup into the prison Lucille was sent to; how they moved around a lot between different family members and friends, often separated from one another and from their baby sister who was born shortly after Lucille was convicted; how they the siblings all began using drugs and alcohol to cope and struggled with substance use disorders for years.

But even though she details these and other troubles both during and after Lucille's imprisonment, the memoir rarely digs deep into any real analysis of what was going on.

Still, Miller's book is moving in its rawness, in its ability to lay out how trauma can derail a person's life without them ever really recognizing it. An especially astute moment is when, following Lucille's death in 1986, Miller realizes that her mother owed money to each and every one of the people attending her memorial.

And still, Miller writes, “They had loved her, been caught in her spell, believed she was innocent of murdering my father, and now that she was gone, they missed her. She had made each one of them believe they were her best friend and that they were the most fascinating, fabulous person in the world. And now here they all were. Who was going to make them feel better than they were now?”

Even someone terrible, Miller recognizes, can be wonderful in some circumstances, to some people; she herself behaved terribly to many, and her regret and grief over her own behavior is palpable.

Miller spent the second half of her life teaching English at a girls' high school in Los Angeles, and although she is now retired, one very much gets the sense that she's attempted, in paying attention to her students, to atone for some of her own sins. “The Most Wonderful Terrible Person” is not a confession, exactly, but it is a reckoning.

Copyright 2026, NPR

A new book by Minnesota author Louise Erdrich is always reason to celebrate.

The acclaimed writer, already graced with a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, returns this month with a collection of short stories, taken from the past 20 years of her work.

“Python’s Kiss” includes both previously published and brand new tales. Each is distinct. They include the aunt with four wedding dresses, a young girl who consoles a lovesick dog, immigrant farmers with a tenuous grip on sanity. There are also two speculative stories set in a corporately owned afterlife, stories that Erdrich says make more sense in today’s A.I. environment than they did when she wrote them.

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Each chapter is accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Erdrich’s daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe. Both women join Kerri Miller in the studio for this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, to talk about the writing, the collaboration and the surprises in “Python’s Kiss.”

Guests:

• Louise Erdrich is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, a small independent bookstore. Her new book is “Python’s Kiss,” a collection of short stories.

• Aza Erdrich Abe is an artist who collaborated on illustrations for “Python’s Kiss.” She’s also been the cover artist for her mom since 2012.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

A two-day celebration of contemporary Indigenous storytelling and performance will take place in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday night.

The Native Joy Play Festival will feature four short plays centered on themes of joy, humor and resilience.

The festival is produced by SAROS field/works and will be directed by White Earth Nation citizen Ernest Briggs. He, alongside other organizers, said they wanted to break away from storylines that center on trauma-driven narratives in Indigenous communities.

“Native joy for me is getting around with community, getting together with family, laughing and joking,” Briggs said. “I think there's an overarching perception that Indigenous life is just trauma. And I was like, ‘No, there's a lot of joy involved in that too.’”

Writer and White Earth Nation citizen Marcie Rendon's 10-minute play, "Friends," is in the lineup. The comedy follows a multigenerational family while answering the question: Why did the Creator create lice?

Rendon said she first debuted the short play over 15 years ago. Since then, it’s been produced in various theaters and has been performed in the Ojibwe language.

“So much of my work is really serious,” she said. “Sometimes I get these wild ideas. And this 10-minute piece was one of my wild ideas.”

She said Indigenous communities can find humor and jokes in almost everything.

“It's one of the ways that we have survived, is by our sense of humor and by being able to laugh at so many things,” Rendon said. “Humor is a great healer.”

The Native Joy Play Festival is funded in part by the Arts & Cultural Affairs department in the City of Minneapolis through the Cultural Districts Art Fund. The fund awards grants to artists living within seven districts of Minneapolis, including Franklin Avenue East Cultural District, which has a large Indigenous population.

Arts and cultural affairs director Ben Johnson said the festival encourages people to safely come together in community.

“There's just incredible theater-making here,” Johnson said. “It’s a very robust, vibrant part of our community.”

Rendon shared the festival not only highlights playwrights but other Indigenous creatives as well.

“It's an opportunity for people to see Native actors perform. There's sort of this mythology that there aren't any Native actors around town, but there really are, and they're the ones that will be performing these four pieces,” she said.

Other plays in the lineup include:

• “Aunty is a Verb” by Lee Cataluna

• “Dance” by Jasmine Rochelle Goodspeed

• “Slow Your Roll” by P.C. Verrone

“My hope is that people will come together in community and get a chance to see a show like this, laugh for a few, laugh for about an hour or so,” Briggs said.

The festival begins at 7 p.m. each night at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. It’s free and open to the public.

Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above.

Want to be an Art Hound? Submit here.

A beloved fantasy comes to the stage

Becca Buntjer of South St. Paul is looking forward to taking her kids to see the world premiere of the play “The Girl Who Drank the Moon” at Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins. The play is an adaptation of the novel by Minneapolis author and Newbery Medalist Kelly Barnhill.

The play runs March 27 through April 19 with performances both during school hours and on weekends. The show is 75 minutes long and is recommended for audiences age 10 and up. There is a special meet-the-author and book-signing event 6-7 p.m. on April 4 before that evening’s show.

Buntjer can’t wait to see a book her family loves adapted for the stage.

Buntjer says: It is a fantastical world with a fun, magic structure, and it's got sweet characters. It is about a young girl named Luna, and she you get to see her grow up as she learns about magic, forgets magic and then learns about it again.

She has this beautiful relationship with Xan, the old witch. You get to see how the different villages that Xan interacts with view her role as the witch. Is she the helper, or is she someone to be feared?

Pro tip: There’s a free parking garage half a block from the theater.

— Becca Buntjer

Generations connect over pastries

Kim Kivens is an actor based in Crystal who has performed before with Six Points Theater, but she’s looking forward to being in the audience for their upcoming production, the world premiere of the play “Vienna, Vienna, Vienna.”

The show follows three generations of women connecting over pastries in Vienna, from where the grandmother fled as a child. The show runs Sat. March 28 through April 12 at Highland Park Community Center in St. Paul. The play is 90 minutes without intermission.

Kim says: Six Points is a theater that I love. They are telling stories that are rooted in Judaism, which is close to me, because I happen to be Jewish — but they are universal stories.

— Kim Kivens

Stargazing through science and story

Erin Makela is an educator and author in Worthington, and she’s looking forward to seeing the play “Silent Sky” at Minnesota West Community and Technical College. The show marks director Eric Parrish’s 50th production.

“Silent Sky” tells the story of Henrietta Leavitt, a 19th-century astronomer and computer (meaning she did the math and science calculations) at Harvard. Though only men were allowed to touch the telescopes, Leavitt’s careful calculations unlocked a key tool for understanding the distance between stars and galaxies.

The play runs March 27-29 at the Worthington Campus Fine Arts Theater. Parrish will be honored after the Friday evening show. Following the Saturday evening show, astronomy instructor Paul Seifert will host a star party with telescopes available to view the night sky. After the Sunday matinee, there will be a talk-back with cast and crew.

As a preview, Erin says: The set looks like a lot of fun. They've got it set up to look like an observatory at the top, and there are different constellations that will be appearing throughout the show on the background.

— Erin Makela

Last fall, Lindsay Hein of Minneapolis invited fellow residents to call a phone number and leave their dreams. By January, she had about 50 messages — and a zine built from strangers’ subconscious.

“It was really cool to, like, listen to just strangers’ voicemails. And I did feel a deeper connection to my neighbors, which was unexpected. I didn't think that was one of the outcomes that would come from this,” Hein said.

The zine is assembled from those calls, tracing the connections that emerged through them.

Hein noticed a few patterns in the dreams, including celebrity appearances, sometimes with unfortunate outcomes like a crushing first impression or a disappointing lasting memory.

She also saw dreams that seemed to carry across relationships.

One man called in and said he and his girlfriend both dreamed of the same house — the kind of overlap Hein was hoping to make space for.

Hein had gotten to a point last year where she wanted to be offline. She wished life were analog, and her first thought was to get a landline.

She described herself as “nosy” and wanted to hear what people would share. So she thought up reasons for people to call in.

What she landed on was shaped by her fascination with dreams.

“I know some people are like, ‘I don't need to hear about other people's dreams, it doesn't matter to me,’” she said. “To me, no matter what the dream you're having or how mundane it is, I think it still shows a lot about how your brain works and where you are right now in your life.”

She scrapped the landline and instead went with a Google Voice number that could receive calls, voicemails and texts.

Then Hein hung posters on bulletin boards all around Minneapolis with hand-made lettering and a sleepy crescent moon adorned with a nightcap. They asked people to call and share their dreams.

She compiled some of the messages into a zine titled "And then I woke up,” now available at Boneshaker Books.

Whenever Victor Van completes an artwork, he exclaims, “I won!”

Visit Van in the studio at the Interact Center in St. Paul, where the prolific artist is surrounded by stacks of his recent paintings and an archive of handmade books and drawings, and it becomes clear: Van wins a lot.

The work is dense, maximalist and playful, with references to pop culture, architecture and urban life, advertising, art history, current events and food and drink. With his books, Van paints and draws KFC meals and Disney characters bumping up against fizzy cocktails and luxury cars, packed in by his tiny, neat scrawl, documenting songs on the radio and other ephemera.

For a decade, Van has worked with Interact, an arts nonprofit that supports contemporary artists living with disabilities. Van recently became the first Interact artist in the center’s 30-year history to have work acquired by the Walker Art Center.

“It’s so incredible!” Van says.

The Walker Art Center, an internationally recognized contemporary art institution in Minneapolis, recently purchased two artist books by Van, “KS95 Best Variety Songs 2013-2014” and the four-part series “Maria Valentina and the Mr. Piper Collection.”

“What struck me, foremost, is just their overall exuberance,” says Meg Black, the head of library and archives at the Walker. “They're visually engaging works using bright colors and expressive lines, and then the content is a surprising combination of words and images sourced from popular culture and the mass media.”

Black adds, “That paradox of the handmade and the mass produced, I just found really incredibly moving and inspiring.”

Van’s artworks will join the Walker Art Center Library’s Rosemary Furtak Collection of about 2,000 artist books, alongside works by Sol Lewitt, Sky Hopinka, Kara Walker and Glen Ligon.

“I’m really proud of him. He deserved it,” says Yawa Vanthanouvong, Van’s mother. “I watch him doing it and I know every piece is precious. It's really good.”

Vanthanouvong says he’s been creating art since the age of 8, around the same age when he learned how to book-bind by hand from his homeroom teacher Dee Lundell at the Ramsey School in Minneapolis.

“I do hand binding,” says Van, nodding. “KS95 Best Variety Songs 2013-2014” and “Maria Valentina and the Mr. Piper Collection” took 10 and 16 years, respectively, to complete, he says.

Wearing protective white gloves, Van’s Interact advocate Jonas Specktor pages through the KS95 book.

“So this is Jan. 19, 2014, and it has Stevie Wonder, ‘Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing,’” Specktor says.

Specktor points to all the data points Van has captured below: the year the song was released, the day the “Innervisions” album was released, the song lyrics, the length of the album version versus the single version and the record label. Squeezed between the handwriting are illustrations of Seagram’s Vodka and a Popeyes bag of food. This is all on one tiny page; Van’s book is an encyclopedic record.

“I'm continuously surprised by not just the level of quality of his work and the considerable volume of work he's making,” Spektor says, “but also his perspective on things. There's a lot of surprise within — what he's documenting. Obviously Victor has a love of movies, music, TV, pop culture in general; but then also geography, landscape, history — all this comes up.”

With “Maria Valentina and the Mr. Piper Collection,” Van has adapted a 1960s Canadian children’s television series using found paper for the covers, a common practice for the artist.

Van points to the tan binding on all four books in the series. It’s made from the paper that wraps around cigarette filters, Van says. That’s one of the reasons that out of all his artist books, this one is his favorite. Soon, Van says, he will visit it at the Walker.

Van’s winning streak continues in New York. “Great Expectations,” Van’s debut solo show, opened March 19 at the Open Studio gallery.

Chris Tungseth, a blue-collar construction worker from Fergus Falls, takes the stage in Hawaii Monday night hoping to vault to the next round of competition on the reality show “American Idol.”

And what makes his accomplishment all the more remarkable, is that Tungseth, who grew up singing for fun, never planned to try out for the show. But fate stepped in when one of Tungseth’s friends signed him up for it without telling him. That led to the 27-year-old scoring an audition and eventually becoming an “American Idol” contestant. 

"I'm just a kid from Fergus Falls, Minnesota. I mean, small school, kind of small colleges, I never thought that this would ever happen, especially when you watch it as a kid,” Tungseth said. “It just doesn't seem like real life, you know? And so, being a part of it, I've been telling everyone, honestly, it feels like a dream, like, how is this even my life?"

So far, Tungseth has gotten to sing on three televised performances in front of "American Idol" judges Lionel Richie, Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan. And they recently advanced him as one of the top 20 finalists.  

"There was a lot of joy, but there was also an element of relief. Like, ‘Oh, they saw me, they connect with me, they see something in me,” Tungseth said. So it's just like … a boost of confidence, and it was just such a gift to … be in that position, and for them to push me into the top 20."

One of the songs Tungseth performed in the early going was the English electronic musician Labrinth’s ballad “Jealous.” He said it’s partly a breakup song, but it also speaks to some of the tragedies in his life. Tungseth’s father died in 2023 from leukemia, and his mother is currently living in a nursing home because of multiple sclerosis.

In a clip shown on the show before his performance, Tungseth told his mother he listened to the song “after losing dad,” and it made him think of her. 

“Because there's parts in that song where it's like, ‘I'm jealous of the rain that falls upon your skin,’” he said. 

His mother, wrought with emotion, told her son, “Share your light.”

Tungseth leaned into music to process what he was going through. But when the show started, he said he was hesitant to share those parts of his life publicly on “American Idol.”

"I never really wanted to use the tragedy in my life to, you know, necessarily help me with my career,” he said. “That was one thing that I guess I was fearful of."

After finding the courage to share his vulnerabilities, Tungseth said he’s received great feedback. 

"I had people pouring into me, telling me, ‘This is such a cool way for you to connect with other people who have been in really difficult situations and seasons in life,’" he said. 

As the son of a pastor, Tungseth said he grew up singing in church, and it was pretty much his only musical platform outside of some weddings and family gatherings. After hearing he would be auditioning for "American Idol" he knew he had to get some gigs under his belt, so he tuned into the local music scene and started performing at open mics, bars and restaurants.

“Now I go from singing in front of 20 people, 50 people, 100 people, to thousands, and now millions,” Tungseth said. “It's mind blowing. My brain can't comprehend what's happening. But it's honestly a blessing."

One of the venues Tungseth performed at was Outstate Brewing Company in Fergus Falls, nestled on the banks of the Otter Tail River. It’s also a place he worked at in the past. Pat Lundberg is its president and CEO. He said he was not surprised when Tungseth, who looks like a mythological Norseman, with his long hair, beard and tall stature, told him he was going to be on "American Idol."

"Of course you are. I mean, look at you, Thor, God of Thunder,” Lundberg said. “If you look at his personality, he's this larger-than-life kind of a person."

Lundberg said Tungseth's time on "American Idol” has drawn the tight-knit community of Fergus Falls even closer together.

"To have one of our own, quote, unquote, be thrust onto the national stage is really quite special,” he said. “And there is a whole community pulling for him and very, very excited for him."

Tungseth will perform on "American Idol" Monday night at 7 p.m., on ABC. This is the second week of “America’s Vote,” where the audience can vote through the show’s website, text messaging and/or social media, to decide who will advance to the top 14. The results will be revealed on March 30.

But before that, Tungseth has a message for everyone in his home state who has tuned into watching his journey. 

“From the bottom of my heart, thank you, I'm blown away at the support,” he said. “It’s such an overwhelming feeling of peace and joy seeing that many people care about this process.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

A book can be a vehicle of empathy, inviting us to walk around in someone else’s world for a while.

Elizabeth Mattson of Henry's Books in Spearfish, South Dakota, says her top pick for novels in this category is "Theo of Golden" by Allen Levi.

Here’s the scenario: In the southern U.S. city of Golden, there’s a bustling coffee shop called The Chalice with 92 pencil-drawn portraits of townspeople, created by a local artist.

When Theo, an elderly man from Portugal, arrives in Golden and decides to settle there, the portraits speak to him. He begins purchasing them one by one and gifting them to the individuals depicted in the portraits.

These acts of conversation, connection, and generosity ripple outward through the community.

Running through the story is a question: Who is Theo, and why is he there?

For readers who prefer to listen to their books, Mattson also says the narrator in the audiobook is excellent.

The throughline this week isn’t just performance, it’s transformation — artists moving across forms, histories surfacing in new contexts and institutions quietly reshaping what they contain.

Across stages, screens and gallery walls, the work returns to the same question from different angles: what carries forward, and what gets remade in the process.

‘Monét X Change: High Heels, Bad Knees Tour’ at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis — March 20

Eight years after her first appearance on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Monét X Change returns to the Twin Cities with a set that moves between opera training and the sharper edges of stand-up. The two-show night leans into that dual identity as vocalist and comic, a reminder that drag has long held musicianship alongside irreverence.

‘Shamel Pitts: Marks of RED’ at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — March 20–21

This Walker/Northrop Centennial Commission arrives as both premiere and endpoint, the final chapter in Shamel Pitts’ multi-year Twin Cities partnership. Through dance, sound and visual design, “Marks of RED” threads Afrofuturism and magical realism into a meditation on memory, embodiment and the layered interior lives of six women.

John Churchwell and resident artists at Luminary Arts Center in Minneapolis — March 21

Minnesota Opera’s latest program centers on John Churchwell, a University of Minnesota alum whose résumé runs from the Metropolitan Opera to Santa Fe. Paired with resident artists, the evening underscores what the region already demonstrates: opera here isn’t about preservation, but an actively built and sustained ecosystem.

Tina Schlieske Sextet at the Dakota in Minneapolis — March 22

A longtime presence on the Midwest rock circuit, Tina Schlieske shifts into jazz with a debut that reframes her voice rather than overhauls it. Backed by a sextet at the Dakota, the set traces a lineage from Bowie and Turner to Sinatra and Holiday, suggesting a career shaped less by genre than by ongoing curiosity.

‘Medicine Ball’ community screening at University of Minnesota Morris in Morris — March 23

Twin Cities PBS’s “Medicine Ball” situates basketball within Native life as both cultural anchor and contemporary outlet, following two student athletes navigating identity and expectation. Screened on the grounds of a former boarding school, the film carries additional historical weight, turning sport into a lens on continuity, trauma and resilience.

‘Where The Seed Remembers: A Celebration Of Earth, Lineage And Memory’ at University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska — March 25–May 17

This multi-artist exhibition, co-curated by Joshua “Brotha Asé” Gillespie, brings together voices across Black, Indigenous and diasporic communities to explore cycles of life and land. With installations, performances and a participatory altar, the exhibition extends beyond display into ritual, asking visitors to place themselves within its framework.

Bad Company film series at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis — Through March 31

The Trylon’s latest series focuses on corporate villainy, pairing cult favorites with a throughline that feels increasingly current. From “RoboCop” to “Network,” the screenings revisit familiar dystopias where profit distorts public life, a premise that lands with particular clarity in 2026.

If there’s a common pulse here, it’s less about reinvention than continuity under pressure — voices extending into new registers, stories returning with sharper edges, spaces holding more than they were designed to. The result is a week that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but lingers, asking you to stay with it a little longer.