Tom Williams

Douglas Tallamy’s first book, “Bringing Nature Home,” awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives.

Several years ago, writer Paisley Rekdal created a digital community project that mapped the people, places, buildings and events that defined Salt Lake City. When she became Utah’s poet laureate, she decided to build on this idea and create a literary map for the entire state.

Photographer, marriage and family therapist and Utah State University alum Kimberly Anderson was on the USU campus in early March to give a presentation on her work. Her presentation, “Transitioning Within Landscapes: The Photography of Kimberly Anderson,” touched on her work as a photographer interwoven with her identity as a transgender woman.

On Thurday's Access Utah, we looked back on our

 preview an Ethics Slam: an event modeled around a Poetry Slam in the sense that it occurs in a community space and it is open mic. Members of the community are asked to share their thoughts in a civil, respectful manner about a pressing social issue. This slam focused on responding to climate change. 

Jodi Byrd joined Tom Williams to discuss the next lecture in the USU College of Humanities’ Tanner Talks series: “Digital Animus in the Age of Liberation.”

From Utah State Magazine, "In the parched black desert of northeast Jordan, archaeologists recently unearthed a stone hearth containing loaves of flatbread more than 14,000 years old.

"The samples contained wild einkorn -- an ancestor of modern wheat. The bread-like discs were likely not an everyday foodstuff for the hunter-gatherers. But in the centuries since, wheat has become the most widely grown cereal crop in the world. That's why researchers at Utah State University are working to protect the global wheat supply."

Meatpacking plants in Cache Valley have been hit hard with COVID-19 with several hundred workers diagnosed with the disease in the past several weeks. Community organizations and individuals are trying to provide needed help to the affected families. Some of the workers at the JBS plant in Hyrum staged a walk-out to protest the company’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

This Is Her Place is a new podcast that tells the remarkable stories of Utah women, past and present, in all their diversity. Businesswomen and religious leaders, poets and politicians, healers and homemakers, artists and activists, women in the Beehive state have never fit into easy stereotypes.

Barbara Farris is a retired health education teacher who lives in Cache Valley. Until March of this year she was in Zambia with the Peace Corps DREAMS program.

Derrik Tollefson is Professor of Social Work and head of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology at Utah State University. He also directs the I-System Institute for Transdisciplinary Studies at USU.

Today on Access Utah, a look at state air quality legislation. This episode was first broadcast in March during the final week of the 2020 session of the Utah Legislature.

Today on Access Utah we revisit a conversation from last year with presenters at the Mountain West Center and Evans Biography Awards Writers Workshop for Auto/Biography.

On Tuesday’s Access Utah, Tom Williams will talk with UNLADYLIKE2020 Executive Producer Sandra Rattley and series creator Charlotte Mangin.

Today on Access Utah, Ginger Gaffney joins us to talk about her memoir “Half Broke," about an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducting a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses.

Co-directors of the USU Digital Folklore Project Jeannie Thomas and Lynne McNeill (USU English Department Head and USU Assistant Professor of English, respectively) will join Tom Williams to talk about the 2019 Digital Trends of the Year.

During these times of unrest and uncertainty we’ve been checking in with writers, poets, and musicians. Next time on Access Utah our guest is Craig Jessop, Director of American Festival Chorus and Orchestra and former Director of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, also former Dean of the USU Caine College of the Arts.

In fighting to pass the 19th Amendment, brave suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Emmeline B. Wells fought to end laws and take down barriers that prevented them from voting. Champions of Change introduces young readers not only to Anthony and Wells, but also to a diverse group of firsts and freedom-fighters in America’s fight for equality.

Today a conversation with Wyoming-based writer Craig Johnson. Craig Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the Netflix original drama. Craig Johnson has received many awards for his books. He lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five. His latest novel in the Longmire series is “Land of Wolves.”

A study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Utah ranks 8th in the nation for the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

David Maisel (b. 1961, New York) is an artist working in photography and video, and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

A team from the University of Southern California has embarked on a 50-state tour to give cybersecurity training to poll workers and state and local campaign staffers who will be the last line of defense against Russian hacking in 2020. The group, called the Election Cybersecurity Initiative, views itself as a bottom-up, grass-roots counterpart to national-level election security efforts led by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of Russia’s election interference in 2016.” (Washington Post January 30, 2020)

It’s been several days now of unrest, protests, and riots in many cities across the U.S. and the world (including Salt Lake City) since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. We'll talk about it on Access Utah today.

Today, a conversation with Jeff Metcalf about his new novel “Wacko’s City of Fun Carnival.”

The Gates of Eden is a historical novel inspired by Nadene LeCheminant’s great-great-grandmother. When Josephine Bell journeys from the slums of Victorian England to a remote Mormon settlement in Utah, the girl finds the Promised Land is not what she expected. Pressed into becoming the bride of an older polygamist, her struggle to find her own path takes her to unexpected places.