New Letters on the Air, a nationally distributed public radio program produced by New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, was named winner of a 2013 Clarion Award for Regular Talk or Interview Program in Radio by the Association for Women in Communications.  Hosted and produced by Angela Elam, the weekly program will be honored at the International Matrix & Clarion Awards Dinner during the 2013 national conference in Springfield, Ill., in October.

The show was selected based on five submissions from the 2012 season, which included interviews with writers Jamaica Kincaid, Jim Shepard, Gloria Vando, Anika Paris, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Alex George.   Stephanie Hughes was technical editor for these programs, and Annie Walsh was the assistant producer for many of them.  This is the second AWC Clarion Award for New Letters on the Air. In 2011, a show called “When She Named Fire,” about women and poetry, won the award for Best Multi-Women’s Issues Radio Program.

This year’s winning interviews are available on the new website www.newletters.org.  Using a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service, New Letters is uploading all the digital audio archives of interviews and readings that were digitized by Marr Sound Archives—a collection dating to the show’s beginning in 1977. It has been described by one Clarion judge as “one of the largest and best collections of recordings of contemporary authors.”

An independent production of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, New Letters on the Air is partially funded by the Missouri Arts Council and is distributed through the Public Radio Satellite System and the Public Radio Exchange, airing on public radio stations throughout the country.  This radio companion to the literary magazine, New Letters, is broadcast in Kansas City on KCUR 89.3 FM Sunday mornings at 6:00 a.m., and is also available by podcast, online or on iTunes.