Michele Norris

Through powerful monologues, Anna Deavere Smith has tackled race riots, integration and health care. In Notes from the Field, she's using her characters to explore the school-to-prison pipeline.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is finishing a run on her latest work, "Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1,2 & 3)" at The Public Theater in New York.

NPR's Michele Norris continues her conversation with Marc Quarles for The Race Card Project. Quarles six words are: With Kids, I'm Dad; Alone: Thug.

Long before James Prosek became a world-famous artist and naturalist, he was a kid who used art as a way to work through the ups and downs of childhood. "When I went into the woods, it was the first time that I felt like something was mine," he says.

In her new memoir The Legs Are The Last To Go, actress Diahann Carroll talks about her glamorous career and lifestyle — and simplifying. But she says, "Stepping away from glamour is not an easy thing to do."

She's been acting for nearly 40 years; now she's taking a stab at directing, producing and writing. And she's doing all that — as well as acting — in one film: Then She Found Me. She tells NPR why.

For comedienne Joan Rivers, almost everything is fair game: race, sex, death and, of course, her life. That's the subject on her new autobiographical play, Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress.

Josh Brolin, who plays laconic Llewelyn Moss in the much-praised new Coen Brothers thriller No Country for Old Men, talks about his appetite for surprising characters and working with the filmmaking brothers.

On the second anniversary of the playwright's death, Michele Norris talks to two actors from the Broadway production of his final play, Radio Golf.

Although he was known principally as a political adviser and campaign strategist, Karl Rove has been a critical part of the White House policy operation as well. The adviser's departure could have wide repercussions.