The Big Read on the Air
Monday, 04/06/09 - Tuesday, 04/28/09
Community Radio Partners with Local Library Consortium to Air Novel
KKFI Community Radio 90.1 is widely known for broadcasting a stellar lineup of jazz and blues, as well as its unique brand of news and public-affairs programming. But this spring KKFI will offer something new: belle lettres over the airwaves.
KKFI will dedicate at total of 8-1/2 hours of airtime (17 half-hour installments) to broadcast the reading of Tobias Wolff's Old School as part of The Big Read, an area-wide initiative involving several libraries across the region.
Old School is the story of an ambitious, idealistic, and insecure teenager who makes a serious mistake and eventually inherits the consequences. Wolff's unnamed narrator seems so very real that it is hard at times to remember that the book is fiction. The gripping plot has the unpredictability of real life—by turns funny, alarming, satiric, and sad—as well as the moral weight of lived experience.
The reading of the Wolff’s novel will reach a potential 1.8-million listeners. KKFI is the exclusive broadcast media partner for The Big Read in the Kansas City market. The program will air daily from 11:30 a.m. to noon weekdays from April 6th to April 28, 2009.
The Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, is working with a cooperative of Kansas City area libraries (known collectively as The Libraries of Greater Kansas City – including the Johnson County Library, The Kansas City Public Library, Mid-Continent Library, North Kansas City Public Library, Olathe Public Library, and the KCK Public Library) to promote The Big Read project.
On-air readers include several well-known Kansas City luminaries, including Crosby Kemper III, director of the Kansas City Public Library; Jane Chu, president and CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts; Steve Paul, Kansas City Star senior editor and writer; Nick Haines, public-affairs producer at KCPT Public Television, and Byran Busby, chief meteorologist for KMBC 9 News.