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
Video game lovers, take heed! The Smithsonian American Art Museum is hosting one of the first exhibits to explore the 40-year evolution of video games... as an art medium. Rebecca Sheir visits the Museum and speaks with curator Chris Melissinos, the mastermind behind the exhibit, which features 80 video games and 20 gaming stations, from the Atari VCS to the PlayStation 3....
WAMU 88.5
Long before Europeans came to the D.C. area, it was home to the Native American tribe of Piscataway. Most of the tribe — which is unrecognized by the federal and state government — lived in small villages and camps along the Chesapeake Bay. Rebecca Sheir visits Piscataway Park with Gabrielle Tayac — whose uncle is the Piscataway Indian Nation's current hereditary chief — to l...
WAMU 88.5
What do you get when you take a former nuclear-fallout facility and fill it with the world's largest collection of films, TV shows, radio broadcasts and sound recordings? The Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is a state-of-the-art facility where the Library of Congress acquires, preserves and provides access to this prized material. Rebecca Sheir visits t...
WAMU 88.5
Ask your average Washingtonian to name the oldest monuments in Washington, and chances are he or she will come up short. That's because the Boundary Stones — i.e., the 40 stone markers placed in 1791 to mark off the federal territory that later became D.C. — have pretty much been forgotten. In the early 1900s, the Daughters of the American Revolution fenced off each stone for pro...
WAMU 88.5
For 200 years, tons of ancient red sandstone from Montgomery County, Md., were transformed in to some of D.C.'s most recognizable buildings - including the stately Smithsonian Castle. The Seneca Quarry closed in 1900, and now that it's covered in impenetrable brambles and brush, most walkers, joggers and cyclists who pass by on the C&O Canal towpath have no idea the historic site was ...
WAMU 88.5
The Indian community in Virginia's Loudoun County has grown tenfold over the past decade. Rebecca Sheir talks with members of this community — including a prominent restaurant owner and a teacher of traditional Kathak dance — to find out why Loudoun has become so attractive to people hailing from all over India. [Music: "DimTana" from Contemporary Kathak Tarana ]...
WAMU 88.5
"As a child, the first words that I remember being taught to say were, 'Now I lay me down to sleep...' The second were, 'They're in session.'" Thus begins 301 East Capitol: Tales From the Heart of the Hill, 93-year-old Mary Z. Gray's brand new book about growing up in her beloved Capitol Hill neighborhood. Rebecca Sheir speaks with Gray, who began writing for the ...
WAMU 88.5
Steve Lickteig grew up thinking he was the adopted son of Don and Mary Jane Lickteig: farmers in Kansas who already had eight biological children. When Steve was 18 years old, his two best friends delivered some stunning news: he was actually the illegitimate son of his oldest sister, and everyone in his life had always known the secret. Lickteig now lives in Washington, D.C., and has...
WAMU 88.5
No matter how sweaty and sweltering we've been feeling this summer, even our highest temperatures -- 105, 110 degrees -- are nothing compared with a spot roughly 93 million miles from here: the sun. And the hottest part of the sun is its center, which is at least 10 million degrees Kelvin: roughly 30,000 times hotter than boiling water. So, we're talking major hotness on that ...
WAMU 88.5
Felipe Bulnes has been the ambassador of Chile for just four months now. And he loves traditional Chilean foods, like fish (“I’m very addicted to seafoods.”), extra-virgin olive oil (“I am obsessed with extra-virgin olive oil.”) and lamb (“Rack of lambs are very good as well. We have them from Patagonia."). And he adores traditional Chilean dishes, like empanadas (...
WAMU 88.5
On last week's show, we whisked you away to Clarke County, Va., home of Holy Cross Abbey, a 62-year-old Trappist monastery in the midst of some major changes. See, the Abbey's been losing money... and men. While Holy Cross housed 60 monks in it...
WAMU 88.5
Ted van Griethuysen has been an actor for decades. "I have been one for longer than I care to remark at the moment," he says with a chuckle. "But my friends would know it's about 60 years." And during those 60 years, van Griethuysen's experienced his share of financial hardships--whether it was coming up short on rent, or getting seriously ill when he lacked health in...
WAMU 88.5
In Clarke County, Va., in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lies the 1,200-acre Trappist monastery known as Holy Cross Abbey. Holy Cross was founded in 1950, in an elegant 18th-century house. Since then, Trappist monks have lived in the house--and the attached dormitory--in accordance with the Rule of Saint Benedict, a religious tradition established in the seventh centu...
WAMU 88.5
Destruction and rebirth are two common themes in the paintings and drawings of Glen Echo Park's resident artist, Jordan Bruns... and for good reason. The 29-year-old survived a rare form of Cushing's disease, and underwent a million-dollar surgery at the National Institutes of Health to remove a tumor lodged behind his eyes. Rebecca Sheir visits Bruns' studio in Glen Echo's Stone Towe...
WAMU 88.5
In an era dominated by CVS, Walgreen's and Rite-Aid, it's increasingly rare to find a locally-owned Mom-and-Pop-style pharmacy. But this year marks the 100th anniversary of Morgan's Pharmacy: an independently-owned Georgetown establishment where owner Barry Deutschman says everybody knows your name. Rebecca Sheir swings by to learn more about Morgan's, and hear how the pharmacy busine...
WAMU 88.5
On the surface, Northern Virginia resident Matt McNeil's upcoming young adult novel, "The Strange Tale of Ben Beesley," is about a fly named Ben, who sets out to save his two friends, Waverly and Oliver, from a spider's poisonous venom. But the book is actually part allegory/part memoir, since McNeil's real-life children, Waverly and Oliver, suffer from MPS III: a rare, degenerative a...
WAMU 88.5
At Washington's Round Robin Bar, over an ice-cold Gin Rickey, the District's signature drink, historian Paul Dickson pontificates on the historical significance of toasts in D.C. "They've always being totally co-mingled with politics," says the author of Toasts: "Over 1,500 of the Best Toasts, Sentiments, Blessings, and Graces." "And one of the things about toasting would be w...
WAMU 88.5
Since Memorial Day, we've seen nearly 20 eateries shut their doors in the D.C. region. Capital Q Barbecue, Buddha Bar, Casa Nonna, Restaurant 3, Meatballs, Ireland's Four Fields... the list goes on and on. Some plan on relocating, others plan on re-opening with a new concept, but others are simply saying, "So long, and thanks for all the fish." Or the barbecue. ...
WAMU 88.5
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an expat American painter known for his rather feisty sense of independence, and in the 1870s, that feisty independence landed Whistler in a rather interesting dispute: one involving painting, pounds and peacocks. Yes, peacocks. Whistler was the driving force behind The Peacock Room, the magnificent blue and gold room at the Smithsonian's Fre...
WAMU 88.5
The Maryland School for the Blind is preparing blind and visually impaired young people to go it alone in the so-called real world, while they're still in school. The 159-year-old institution in Parkville, Md., offers on-campus day and residential programs for roughly 185 blind and visually impaired students, and this past semester, MSB opened the doors of its second Independe...