Sage Van Wing

Katherine Lee Bates’ greatest hope in life was to write a poem that people would remember after she died. Soon, 133 years later, millions of people across the United States will sing “America the Beautiful,” commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary. However, some of the same problems America faced at the time Bates wrote her poem are still relevant today.

Oregon students missed classes, left school and struggled to learn as the fear of ICE undermined the school year. Washington County saw Oregon’s highest number of recorded immigration arrests from July to December. In all, Operation Black Rose led to the detention of more than 1,400 people statewide. That number includes some of the 39 kids who were arrested in Oregon between January 2025 and this February, according to the Deportation Data Project. OPB reporters Holly Bartholomew and Elizabeth Miller join us to talk about what they’ve learned in terms of how immigration enforcement has impacted Oregon students.

Last year over 7,000 people gathered on camp chairs and picnic blankets to hear the opera “Carmen” at Peninsula Park in Portland. It was a performance staged by the organization Opera in the Park, which aims to share the love of opera with as many people as possible. This year the organization will bring the Oregon premiere of the world’s first Mariachi opera, “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna,” to both Portland and Hillsboro.

In January of 2027, people on Medicaid will need to meet a slate of new requirements

One of the most watched congressional races in the country is in Southwest Washington, and yesterday’s primary yielded few surprises.

At first, Ada Limón wasn’t able to write poetry during the pandemic. And then she wrote a poem called “The Hurting Kind.” From that flowed the rest of her new book of poems under that same name. We talked to Limón, then the poet laureate of the United States, before an audience in April 2023 at the Literary Arts space in downtown Portland.

Oregon has given developers $1.4 billion to fund affordable housing as the cost of developing each subsidized apartment has nearly doubled.

The band Orquestra Pacífico Tropical has had at least 19 different members over the years, and at any given time there are at least 10 people playing on stage.

Broadcast: Wednesday, Sept. 2 Kimberly Lining remembers calling the information number on a flyer for a missing Indigenous woman and learning that the photo on the flyer didn't even belong to the missing woman.

Oregon author Lidia Yuknavitch aims to expand that space with a new book of essays she edited. “ The Big M ” is a collection by 13 different writers reflecting on their experiences of menopause and perimenopause. The book uses these distinct but unified perspectives to rebrand and reinvent our understanding of “the big change.”