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Stage & Studio: Many Roads In Conversation

Dmae Lo Roberts and Patti Duncan talk in this podcast about the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes and growing up mixed race in the United States.

February 9, 2022

Dmae Lo Roberts

Culture, News, Stage & Studio

Dmae Lo Roberts presents an audio podcast produced by The Immigrant Story that features a frank and personal exploration of mixed-race Asian American identity.

Roberts and writer and educator Patti Duncan, as friends and colleagues, have explored what this identity means as it evolves and becomes redefined through the years. The Immigrant Story asked the two to discuss their identity for the podcast Many Roads In Conversation, at a time when anti-AAPI hate crimes have been on the rise the last two years.

Many Roads In Conversation is a special series of conversations for The Immigrant Project’s Many Roads To Here podcast that looks deeply at issues affecting communities within the United States. The Immigrant Story created this inaugural series to focus on the roots of anti-AAPI violence.

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Hear past shows on Stage & Studio website. Theme Music by Clark Salisbury.

Some of the topics Roberts and Duncan cover are about growing up mixed race in America, as well as the politics, terminology, and gender issues surrounding mixed-race families.

As a writer, media and theater artist and as the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit based in Portland, Roberts has written plays and penned a book of personal essays as well as created autobiographical audio pieces and films about her mixed-race experiences.

Duncan is an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. She is the author of Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech (University of Iowa Press, 2004), co-editor of Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices (Demeter Press, 2014), and co-editor of Women’s Lives Around the World: A Global Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press, 2018).

Roberts recorded the conversation with Duncan and edited it for The Immigrant Story. Additional editing and mixing was by Rick March and Gregg Palmer. Sankar Raman is the executive producer of The Immigrant Story and Many Roads In Conversation.

This episode of Many Roads In Conversation was produced as a part of the Oregon Rises Against Hate coalition and was made possible by a generous contribution by Anne Naito-Campbell.

For more information about anti-AAPI hate crimes and violence visit: https://stopaapihate.org/

Dmae Lo Roberts

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody winning radio producer, writer and theatre artist. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. She adapted this radio documentary into a film. She won a second Peabody-award for her eight-hour Crossing East documentary, the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Her stage plays and essays have been published in numerous publications. She published her memoir The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family in 2016. As a theatre artist, she has won two Drammys, one for her acting and one for her play Picasso In The Back Seat which also won the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC and Florida. Roberts is the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora, an Asian American/Pacific Islander non-profit theatre that started as a project of MediaRites. She created the Crossing East Archive of more than 200 hours of broadcast-quality, pan-AAPI interviews and oral histories. For 23 years, Roberts volunteered to host and produce Stage & Studio live on KBOO radio. In 2009, she started the podcast on StagenStudio.com, which continues at ArtsWatch.