Youth Radio chronicles life in Oakland, California, where an alarming number of youth homicides has weighed heavily on the community. The story uses as its centerpiece a poem by Ise Lyfe -- a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. The killings have been a major topic of conversation in Oakland among youth, from young poets, to teens gathered on the sidewalk, to kids taking the bus home from school. A high percentage of the victims are youth, sometimes as many as three in a single week. Youth Radio documents the words of young residents in street corner conversations in East Oakland, the neighborhood where much of the violence has taken place. The voices are Youth Radio's Gerald Ward II, Bianca Yarborough, her mom Bridget Taylor, and poet Ise Lyfe.

Your mom's got Van Morrison on repeat, she wants to talk "mother daughter trust," and there's still hundreds of miles left to go. Trapped inside a family car trip gone horribly wrong. Jesse Chanin reports from the backseat.

"What are you going to do?" said Valerie's boyfriend, when she told him she was pregnant. This piece weaves together the stories of two teen mothers from Chicago's Southwest Side who receive different levels of support from their babies' fathers and from their own families. This piece looks honestly at the sometimes disturbing takes the teens have on pregnancy ("It was like I was meant to get pregnant," says Valerie), the day-to-day pleasures the new moms feel with their children, as well as the difficulties that accompany motherhood in high school: exhaustion in class, falling grades, depression. The candid, personal, sometimes funny stories of these two young women are of concern to all listeners, from youth to parents to policy makers. On July 4, this piece was broadcast on Jake Austen's public affairs show on Chicago's WHPK 88.5.