Join us for a virtual listening party with producers and writers working with oral history collections at Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library. Adwoa Adusei and Virginia Marshall of the Borrowed podcast will share highlights from their recent mini-series, "Building Brooklyn," which included Navy Yard oral history collection and Our Streets, Our Stories local oral history collection at BPL's Center for Brooklyn History, and the current season celebrating BPL's 125th anniversary. Jordan Gass-Pooré of the Queens Memory podcast's season will discuss how she led a fully remote team of producers to build on oral history recordings and archival contributions to the COVID-19 Project. Melody Cao of Queens Memory's upcoming season will play a sneak peek ahead of the mid-April release and offer insight into working with multilingual productions and audiences.
The panelists will share advice for working with library and archives colleagues and professional audio producers, using existing collections for inspiration, and inviting the public to share their stories for audio projects.
Panelist Bios
Adwoa Adusei is a supervisory librarian at Brooklyn Public Library working with communities across the borough over the past seven years. A graduate of Palmer School of Library and Information Science, she also holds a Masters from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and so naturally jumps at any chance to highlight art, architecture, and information accessibility in public programming. Podcasting has proven a surprisingly unique way to engage with all three. Adwoa helped to conceive and produce the community oral history project titled Brownsville Excerpts with the help of fellow librarians, community members and volunteers. She has cohosted Borrowed for four seasons and co-writes episodes with producer Virginia Marshall and co-host Krissa Corbett Kavouras.
Melody Cao is a freelance journalist based in New York. She works with several organizations and media companies on their news websites, social media, video projects and marketing campaigns. Melody started her reporting career in 2010 with SinoVision, an American Chinese TV station for local news in NYC, as a daily news TV reporter. Later on, she focused more on producing feature stories and short documentaries. In 2013, her coverage on Hurricane Sandy won Best Video at the Ippies Awards. She worked with the 2016 National Health fellowship and produced a three-episode series on Chinese American autistic children. In 2017, she produced a 7-episode program on second generation immigrant entrepreneurs and was nominated for a 2018 New York Emmy Award. Melody holds a Master's Degree in International Relation and Communication from Boston University and Bachelor's Degree in Journalism from Fudan University in China.
Virginia Marshall is BPL’s podcast associate, where she writes and produces Borrowed, the library’s flagship podcast. In September 2021, Borrowed premiered its first mini-series, “Building Brooklyn,” which drew from oral histories collected by the Center for Brooklyn History at BPL. In 2020, Virginia coordinated the library’s COVID-19 Stories Project, a collection of 50 publicly accessible oral histories about the pandemic. At the moment, she’s co-writing season five of Borrowed with co-hosts Adwoa Adusei and Krissa Corbett Cavouras, and working with two children’s librarians to create a wild and fun library podcast for kids, which is set to launch in June 2022. Previously, she produced and edited for WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station.
Jordan Gass-Pooré (she/her) is an award-winning producer and investigative journalist with more than a decade of journalism experience. Presently, Jordan is a producer of CNN’s podcast called Chasing Life, hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Prior to this, she was a producer of CNN’s daily coronavirus podcast, “Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s investigative podcast Sounds Like Hate. She is also the co-founder of Local Switchboard NYC, which provides hands-on journalism and audio production training to New Yorkers in the form of a podcast of the same name.
Please contact programming@nycarchivists.org with any questions or for more information.
