The Third Coast International Audio Festival brings the best new documentaries produced worldwide to the national airwaves in a special two-hour program hosted by award-winning writer, producer and humorist, Gwen Macsai.

The featured documentaries, all winners of the 12th annual TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition, demonstrate just how powerful radio can be. Innovative and insightful, the stories will engage, provoke, entertain, and transport listeners. In addition to these memorable stories, Best of the Best includes clips from our 2012 awards ceremony and interviews with winning producers Joe Richman, Sue Jaye Johnson, Habiba Nosheen, Brian Reed and Laurence Grissell who give us a glimpse into the art of audio storytelling. You'll also hear from Olympic gold medal winner Claressa Sheilds, subject of the Third Coast gold award-winning story, Teen Contender .

Best of the Best may be presented in a number of ways, as a two hour program, or as two one-hour programs. Stations may also air just one hour.

Boxing has been an Olympic sport since the time of the ancient Greeks. But only men have taken part. This year, that changes. For the first time ever, women will step into the ring at the 2012 summer Olympics in London.

One of the Olympic contenders is 16-year old Claressa Shields, a junior at Northwestern High School in Flint, Michigan.

Sue Jaye Johnson and Joe Richman of Radio Diaries followed Claressa as she prepared for the Olympic trials. They also gave her a tape recorder to keep an audio diary of her life. This is her story.

This piece was produced by Joe Richman, Samara Freemark and Sue Jaye Johnson of Radio Diaries, with editors Deborah George and Ben Shapiro.

It’s a collaboration with WNYC’s Women Box Project. You can find photos and more about Claressa Shields – and many other women boxers –  at womenbox.com and radiodiaries.org.

Update: Claressa Shields is currently ranked #2 in the world in her wieght class! Her first Olympic fight will be August 5th.

For more updates follow us on twitter @radiodiaries

The Third Coast International Audio Festival brings the best new documentaries produced worldwide to the national airwaves in a special two-hour program, Best of the Best: The 2011 Third Coast Festival Broadcast.

The featured documentaries, all winners of the 11th annual TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition, demonstrate just how powerful radio can be. Innovative and insightful, the stories will engage, provoke, entertain, and transport listeners, proving that all you need to discover new worlds is...a little box and an antenna. In addition to these memorable stories, Best of the Best includes interviews with winning producers Nick van der Kolk, Jad Abumrad and Ben Calhoun, who give us a glimpse into the art of audio storytelling.

Best of the Best may be presented in a number of ways, as a two hour program, or as two one-hour programs. Stations may also air just one hour.

The military has failed to comply with its own tobacco pricing restrictions, selling millions of dollars of tobacco-based products to service members well beneath legal limits. As a result, the Department of Defense spends over $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money a year on tobacco-related expenses. Maybe it doesn’t have to.

The Third Coast International Audio Festival brings the best new documentaries produced worldwide to the national airwaves in a special two-hour program, Best of the Best: The 2010 Third Coast Festival Broadcast.

The featured documentaries, all winners of the 10th annual TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition, demonstrate just how powerful radio can be. Innovative and insightful, the stories will engage, provoke, entertain, and transport listeners, proving that all you need to discover new worlds is...a little box and an antenna. In addition to these memorable stories, Best of the Best includes interviews with the winning producers who give us a glimpse into the art of audio storytelling, and highlights from the 2010 Third Coast Awards Ceremony hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab.

Best of the Best may be presented in a number of ways, as a two hour program, or as two one-hour programs. Stations may also air just one hour and in that case we recommend hour two, featuring the silver and gold award winners.

  “American Dreamer: Sam’s Story” tells the story of a talented and articulate young jazz musician named Sam, who was brought to the U.S. at age 5 by his Mexican parents. He stayed out of trouble, was drum major of his high school’s marching band, fell in love with playing jazz on the tenor sax, and got his diploma with honors– only to find that for an “illegal,” graduation marks a dead end. .  Though Sam dreams of attending college to study jazz performance, he hides his status from even his closest friends, and can’t legally work, drive, get financial aid, or even gain admission to some colleges.  "American Dreamer" follows him from his high school graduation, through the following summer, as he struggles to raise money to continue his education and weighs the risks of working and driving illegally against his own desire to achieve his American dream.

Carol Brobeck and Joel Woodruff recount the adoption and reunion, twenty years later, that define their relationship.  The story centers around the reunion itself, the moment when they actually found each other.  Joel and Carol were interviewed separately, but their story is interwoven here, without narration or music.

The Third Coast International Audio Festival and PRI, Public Radio International, bring the best new documentaries produced worldwide to the U.S. airwaves in a special two-hour program, the "2009 Third Coast Broadcast." Hosted by award-winning writer, producer, and humorist Gwen Macsai, the featured documentaries, all winners of the ninth annual TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition, prove just how powerful radio can be. Innovative and insightful, the stories engage, provoke, entertain and transport listeners, proving that all one needs to discover new worlds is a little box and an antenna.

In addition to showcasing the winning documentaries, the "2009 Third Coast Broadcast" includes interviews with the winning producers, who give a glimpse into the art of audio storytelling, a profile of the year's Audio Luminary Award winner, and highlights from the annual Awards Ceremony. 

The 2009 Third Coast Broadcast is presented as a two hour program. The first hour is split into three segments (with cutaways at approximately :20 and :40 and :59) and the second hour is split into two segments (with cutaways at approximately :29 and :59).

For more information, or if you have questions, please contact info@thirdcoastfestival.org.

This is a story I did for This American Life. It just won the Gold Prize at the Third Coast Audio Festival, which was incredibly exciting. The story is about heartbreak and wallowing and sadness and how songs make you stay sad, but in a good way. I hope you like it.

Searching For Farming's Future in its Past is part of a series produced by Rachel Leventhal for the NRDC about the impact individuals can make on their world. Jonathan and Nina White own The Bobolink Dairy in Vernon, New Jersey. They make artisanal grass-fed cheese, wood-fired bread, give cheesemaking classes to agritourists, and are de-industrializing farming before our planet runs out of food - or are trying to. Lesson one: cows living on pasture instead of in feedlots know they're bigger than you. Operating in the black four out of their five years in business, the Whites have proven that sustainable farming can be profitable. But a bigger question looms: How do you make sustainable farming, well, sustainable?

How do we deal with dying? Most of us look away. But in the case of the Zagar family, they look closer. A father and son have a contest to take the best photos of their dying grandpa, and the result is an up-close portrait of death.   Winner of a Bronze Award at the 2007 Third Coast Festivals Competition.  Judges at Third Coast called the piece, “tense, loving, risky, provocative and profound. The pacing, story craft and character development make this a truly moving and memorable story."

South Africa has the largest number of people with HIV/AIDS in the world. More than five million South Africans are HIV positive. Thembi is one of them. For the past year, she has been carrying a tape recorder and keeping an audio diary of her struggle to live with AIDS. For photographs, background information, and the AIDS Action Toolkit, visit: http://www.radiodiaries.org/?p=319 

Between Friends It was a secret shared between 10 year-old girls. Twenty years later, it became evidence in a court case. Jody Porter knows how important it was to share the burden back then. But how does her friend feel about it all these years later? by Jody Porter Producer: Neil Sandell Outfront Opening and Closing Theme available - (see Timing and Cues section for more details) SEE ADDITIONAL LICENSE TERMS

After waiting in vain for Mr. Right - and after years of fertility treatments - Suzanne, a single, white woman in her forties, decided to adopt. She chose transracial adoption. Long Haul Productions documented the entire process - beginning with workshops designed to "teach white people to raise kids of color," baby-shopping trips with Mom at Target, a critical rendezvous with a young mother at a pancake house, and, finally, a magical night at a suburban restaurant chain. Producers Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister followed Suzanne for several months as she waited to see if she would become a parent; she offered extraordinary access into her home, and really, into every aspect of her life. This piece debuted on May 9, 2005, on WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio), and subsequently aired May 10, 2005, on All Things Considered. "Dear Birth Mother" is a follow-up to "Babyquest," also available on PRX, which documents Suzanne's failed attempt to get pregnant via In Vitro fertilization.

Ten years ago, a whale washed ashore on the beach of Lubec in the poorest county in Maine. The people in town had to make a decision quickly—how would they get rid of a 60-ton dead whale?

Remembering Kent State 1970 marks the 40^th anniversary of May 4, 1970 when Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 students at Kent State University after an anti-war rally.   Four students were killed and 9 were wounded.    A federal investigation called the shootings “inexcusable” but no Guardsmen were ever convicted of a crime.  The event has been called “America’s Tiananmen Square Massacre.” 

In 1966, a young marine took a reel-to reel tape recorder with him into the Vietnam War. For two months, until he was killed in action, Michael Baronowski made tapes of his friends, of life in fighting holes, of combat. 34 years later, his comrade Tim Duffie brought Baronowski's three-inch reels to Lost & Found Sound. The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski aired on NPR's All Things Considered on the 25th anniversary of America's withdrawal from the Vietnam. The documentary shed light on the experience of that war, and, in some measure, of all wars. It used the power of radio to reveal the heart through the voice and to see in the dark. It combined the rare talent of the late Baronowski as a "correspondent" from the front, the compassion of his dedicated platoon mate Duffie. This program struck a universal chord with listeners--with those who fought the war, those who protested it, and those who weren't even born at the time. It generated perhaps the greatest outpouring of response in the history of NPR's All Things Considered to date. The documentary won the first Gold Award in the Third Coast Audio Festival competition. Produced by Christina Egloff with Jay Allison.