By Jada F. Smith
Al Letson is not your typical radio host. He doesn’t warp the daily horoscope for laughs, he doesn’t acquiesce to the latest celebrity gossip and his face will probably never appear on the side of a bus. He’s more likely to be found hovering around one of those bus stops or at a local poetry reading, getting to know the stories of real people who are often talked about, but rarely actually listened to in mainstream media.
Much has been said in politics this year about the residents of “Main Street” – what they supposedly want, need and are not receiving from their leaders. Letson, understanding the basic human desire for self-expression and the comfort of a listening ear, found a way to broadcast their stories to an audience bigger than most of the small towns he reports from.
Three years ago, Letson entered a competition sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting aimed at finding a new voice in public radio talent. The Public Radio Talent Quest offered a grant that provided a year’s worth of funding for an independently produced radio show that would speak to a new generation of Americans. There were no guarantees that the winner of the contest would have his or her show aired on the radio, or even played for audiences outside of the judging panel. But Letson, a professional poet and spoken word artist, took his vision for a program that valued the insight and stories of regular people and produced “State of the Re:Union” that now airs on more than 170 NPR stations nationwide.
SOTRU focuses on the way small communities across the country band together to solve their problems for the greater good. “The way our media tends to portray this country is not how it’s lived on the ground,” he said. “I went to a small town in Kansas, one of the reddest states, and it had been destroyed by a tornado. Everybody in the community chipped in their own money to rebuild downtown. That’s socialism. I’ve traveled the country and seen places where you think ideas like that would not be able to take route, but people figure out ways to make things work.”
A career in public broadcasting was the destination on an unlikely path. He maneuvered most of his career throughout the Poetry Slam Movement, which helped him develop as an artist and ease the transition into nationally syndicated radio host. Before NPR, he was lending his voice to HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, CBS’s Final Four PreGame Show and commercial features for Sony and Adobe Software. Each step unknowingly prepared him for this moment.
