WAMU 88.5 Contributors

Rebecca Sheir

Host, Metro Connection

Sheir joined WAMU in 2009 as a news anchor, host and reporter. She became the host of Metro Connection in August 2010.

Sheir came to the nation's capital by way of Alaska, where she traveled amongst the moose and mountains as the host of AK, the award-winning show on the Alaska Public Radio Network. While in the Last Frontier, she also did reporting for NPR member station KTOO in Juneau.

Sheir's radio stories have won numerous awards – including the Third Coast International Audio Festival Directors' Choice Award – and have aired on public radio venues and programs, including All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Marketplace, The Splendid Table, Latino USA, Only a Game, Here & Now, Interfaith Voices, Voice of America, Chicago Public Radio, New Hampshire Public Radio and Iowa Public Radio. She has taught her original radio essay/commentary course, "Radio Voices," at the University of Iowa and University of Alaska Anchorage.

Sheir received her BA from Columbia University in New York City, where she also worked in Off-Broadway theater production: first with Stephen Sondheim's Young Playwrights Inc., then with Naked Angels Theatre Company. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa.


Articles Written by Rebecca Sheir

WAMU 88.5
Think back to fourth grade. What were you doing in school? Were you practicing fractions? Learning photosynthesis? Maybe you were studying the British colonization of the New World? Well, if we fast-forward to now, a modern-day fourth grader named Sarah Schmidt has been up to something a little bit different. "We made the treaty last week about buying the land," she e...
WAMU 88.5
Rebecca Sheir introduces us to the native Washingtonians behind Ugly Purple Sweater: An eclectic, up-and-coming local band whose brand-new album features songs about life in Washington....
WAMU 88.5
Residents of Maryland's Eastern Shore are trying to make over one of the earliest existing skipjacks in the Chesapeake skipjack fleet. "Kathryn" is undergoing a complete restoration after a mishap during the 2011 Skipjack Races in Deal Island, Md. Rebecca Sheir visits the oyster dredgeboat to see how she's coming along, and how the community plans to raise the $300,000 needed to get K...
WAMU 88.5
This past weekend, the Georgetown Gilbert & Sullivan Society presented its 40th anniversary production of Trial By Jury. It was this same politically satirical operetta that launched the Georgetown Gilbert & Sullivan Society back in 1973, thanks to a first-year student by the name of Jack Marshall. "Early on, I was sitting in what was then the moot courtroom; n...
WAMU 88.5
Some residents in Sandy Spring, a rural town just east of Olney, in Montgomery County, Md., have been tangled up in a legal dispute against the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission since 2006. The residents are part of a kinship community — an area settled by freed slaves after the Civil War. Under dispute is their property and why it doesn't have an address. ...
WAMU 88.5
Back in February, President Obama warned that if the 10-year, $1.2 trillion sequester went in to effect, middle class families, as well as the economy as a whole, would take a huge hit. As of March 1, those cuts did indeed go into effect, and granted, many agencies — and people — are feeling the effects. But some experts are saying the sequester's impact aren't necessarily...
WAMU 88.5
The play, "How To Write a New Book For the Bible," tells the story of a Jesuit priest named Bill Cain, who returns to his ailing mother's home to take care of her in her final days. It was penned by award-winning playwright Bill Cain, who's also, yes, a Jesuit priest. "Jesuits believe that you find God in everything," explains director Ryan Rilette, Round House's producing art...
WAMU 88.5
What happens when a tea-loving British minister walks in to a medium-security prison? Kind of sounds like the set-up to an old joke, right? But it's not. It's what actually happened to professional storyteller and ordained minister Geraldine Buckley on Nov. 11, 2004. And "Sister Geraldine," as the inmates called her, didn't just "walk" in to the Maryland Correctional Training Center i...
WAMU 88.5
Mary T. & Lizzy K., the world-premiere show now playing at Arena Stage in southwest D.C., explores the relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and her personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley. Playwright and director Tazewell Thompson points out, the two made for a rather unlikely pair. "There was something so compelling and so complex and so unbelievable that during th...
WAMU 88.5
In May 2012, Washington, D.C. lost one of its musical icons in Chuck Brown, a man who's affectionately been referred to as the godfather of go-go. The District is honoring Chuck Brown's musical legacy with a brand new memorial at Langdon Park in northeast D.C. The hope is to break ground t...
WAMU 88.5
Jamaica is coming to Adventure Theatre Musical Theatre Center this spring, with the world-premiere musical, Three Little Birds. The show is based on the children’s book of the same name, penned by Cedella Marley, daughter of legendary reggae artist Bob Marley. And it features ...
WAMU 88.5
It wouldn't be spring in D.C., without the annual global culinary showdown: The Embassy Chef Challenge. The 2013 challenge took place Thursday night, and the winning chef was crowned by the 2012 champion, Chef Viktor Merényi, from the Embassy of Hungary. Chef Viktor has been cooking in the U.S. for four years now, and he says he has one primary goal when whipping up dishes f...
WAMU 88.5
In less than a week, the District will be holding its big, blowout celebration of the season: the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival. The festival commemorates the 3,000 cherry trees gifted to Washington by the mayor of Tokyo back in 1912. And this year, from March 20 through April 14, visitors will be treated to all sorts of delights, from cherry-blossom yoga and cherry-...
WAMU 88.5
Marione Ingram, 77, says if it weren't for one of the 20th century's worst firestorms, she may have been lost in the 20th century's worst genocide. Ingram grew up Jewish in Hamburg, Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and recounts the infamous 1943 bombing of her town in her new memoir, "The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope, From a Survivor of the Holocaust."...
WAMU 88.5
Up until recently, one might wander into the Phillips Collection kitchen and smelled the scent of honey and wax. “You don’t really notice it now, after working with it so much,” says Jeremiah Holland, a student at the Corcoran School of Art. “But you miss it when it’s not around. It’s very pleasant, even after you’ve worked in it for quite some time." Jer...
WAMU 88.5
On a recent Wednesday evening at the D.C. Armory, a dozen or so women in helmets, kneepads and roller skates are standing in a huddle. At the count of three, they all call out in forceful voices: "Mean and Green! Whips! Whips! Whips!" That's the battle cry of the Majority Whips: one of five teams in the District's only flat-track roller derby league: The D.C. Rollergirls. ...
WAMU 88.5
Ugly Purple Sweater is a local band whose five members were not only born in the D.C., area, they also sing about it. Their biggest hit is a song called "Jumbo Slice," written about, yes, the infamous eatery on 18th Street in Adams Morgan. Lead vocalist, guitarist and keyboardist Sam McCormally says "Jumbo S...
WAMU 88.5
This weekend marks a momentous occasion for Hollywood, as stars of the silver screen gather in Los Angeles for the 85th Academy Awards. Among the various contenders in different categories, there will be a handful of films — Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, among them — that cast the nation's Capitol in somewhat of a starring role. Mike Canni...
WAMU 88.5
It's African American History Month, and across Montgomery County, Md., there are about 40 communities that played a very particular role in the region's African American history. They were all settled by freed slaves in the 19th century, and include places like Lyttonsville, Lincoln Park, Sugarland, Jerusalem, Tobytown, Stewartown, Ken-Gar, Sandy Spring, and Scotland. They're often r...
WAMU 88.5
Gina Chersevani has been tending bar in Washington for years. But rather than calling herself a "bartender," she prefers another title. "I like calling myself the 'mixtress' because it's just a little bit naughty, and a little bit nice," she says with a laugh. Chersevani heads up the Eddy Bar, inside Hank's Oyster Bar on Capitol Hill. This Valentine's Day weekend, Hank...