ANGELA ELAM has been fascinated with hearing stories since she was a child in rural South Carolina, listening to the adults around her talk about their struggles with day-to-day life. Add that to her love of reading and writing, it's no wonder she ended up as an English major and then in public radio, first training at Deutsche Welle in Cologne, Germany, and eventually working at WUGA in Athens, Georgia, after completing her MFA in playwriting at the University of Georgia.

There she collaborated on several projects with the literary journal, The Georgia Review, which served as a precursor to her 25 years of producing the nationally distributed literary show, New Letters on the Air for New Letters magazine at UMKC, where she also taught radio production in the Communication Studies Department.