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
On our Global D.C. show, we met Unum's owner and chef Phillip Blaine, whose internationally inspired dishes represent a long-held dream of opening his very own restaurant. Blaine's fellow dreamer is his wife: Unum's other owner, Laura Schiller. B...
WAMU 88.5
Mirah Horowitz happily works like a dog to keep her dual gigs going. And actually, one of those gigs has her working with dogs, too. To date: more than 4,200. That's because Horowitz volunteers as the executive director of Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. Since Horowitz started Lucky Dog in May 2009, the all-volunteer non-profit has saved dogs from shelters in Virginia and the Carolin...
WAMU 88.5
It's widely said that Washington, D.C., isn't exactly famous for its overabundance of 24-hour dining spots. Granted, the city does have a smattering of 24-7 eateries, like The Diner in Adams Morgan, and Osman & Joe's Steak & Egg Kitchen in Tenleytown. And on the weekends, one can toss in stand-bys like Annie's Paramount Steakhouse, and Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café, in Du...
WAMU 88.5
It may seem surprising, but one of Washington, D.C.'s liveliest nighttime spots is on the western end of the National Mall. The Lincoln Memorial is open 24 hours a day, and of the millions of visitors who flock to the grand structure each year, many visit at night. We recently swung by the Lincoln Memorial around the stroke of midnight, to find out what makes the Memorial such...
WAMU 88.5
Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood has long been home to some truly titillating tales and sinful scandals. In the new book, Wicked Capitol Hill: An Unruly History of Behaving Badly, tour guide and local historian Robert Pohl wends his way through some of the juiciest scandals in Capitol Hill's history. One of his favorite tales concerns Kentucky Congressman William Preston...
WAMU 88.5
During lunchtime at Adams Morgan's Amsterdam Falafelshop, the cozy café is always buzzing and humming with customers chatting and chomping on pitas stuffed with fresh-made falafel and other fixings. But outside, on 18th Street, it's buzzing and humming, too. Not to mention rattling, clattering and in some cases, slamming! That's because construction crews are wrapping...
WAMU 88.5
Jim Dandy -- a.k.a. Samuel Myers -- spent decades keeping Silver Spring's attire in tip-top form. The 97-year-old owner of Jim Dandy Cleaners and Formal Wear died recently, a fact that loyal customers learned from a handwritten note left by his family on his shop's locked door. Rebecca Sheir remembers the man who told her in September that "nothing can stop that power of love." ...
WAMU 88.5
Local architectural historian Stephen Hansen has found a way to bring new meaning to the phrase, "Gone, but not forgotten." The head of historic preservation and design firm D.C. Historic Designs has launched a blog called "Virtual Architectural Archaeology: Recreating the Lost (or Nearly Lost) Built Environment in and around Washington, D.C." He acknowledges that "virtual arc...
WAMU 88.5
Penned by outspoken AIDS activist and D.C. native Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart premiered at New York's Public Theater in 1986. In 2011, a revival made a smash on Broadway. But never in the play's history has it been professionally produced in Kramer's hometown—until now. Starting June 8, last year's Tony Award-winning production is gracing Arena Stage's Kreeger Th...
WAMU 88.5
As debate continues about relaxing D.C.'s Heights of Buildings Act--the 1899 law that limits most buildings in the District to no higher than 130 feet--little is said about the man who inadvertently helped bring about that law: Thomas F. Schneider. The architect and developer designed the Cairo: the 12-story building on Q Street NW that sparked such public uproar, Congress pas...
WAMU 88.5
If you've ever looked at a map of D.C., you've probably noticed that the boundaries of our nation's capital form a diamond. These days, that diamond is technically missing a corner: the piece of land that Congress handed back to Virginia in the 1840s. But that diamond was whole back in 1791, when it was created by a surveying team led by Maj. Andrew Ellicott, and along that di...
WAMU 88.5
Andile Ndlovu is an internationally acclaimed dancer, and a member of The Washington Ballet. He hails from Soweto, in Johannesburg, South Africa: the townships that were once at the heart of the apartheid struggle. When he started dancing as a young boy, local kids would tease him for doing ballet; they considered it elitist, for white people only, and especially unsuitable fo...
WAMU 88.5
The motto "E Pluribus Unum" has made an appearance on dollar bills, on the U.S. Great Seal and now... on the D.C. dining scene. Unum is the new restaurant opened by chef Phillip Blane and his wife, Laura Schiller. Blane says the new American eatery with international influences is a culinary embodiment of the "out of many, one" idea that represents the multicultural nation of ...
WAMU 88.5
"Shepherd." "Child Welfare Goddess." "Cheerleader." "Part Guidance Counselor, Part Best Friend." These are just some of the nicknames for what Alexandria Wood does for a living. As the "Young Actor Coordinator" for Arena Stage, Wood is responsible for supervising actors under age 16, per the Actors' Equity production contract. "We're basically a little bit of a persona...
WAMU 88.5
Northern Virginia resident Waverly McNeil was 4 years old when she was diagnosed with a genetic, degenerative disorder present in one out of every 24,000 births: Sanfilippo Syndrome, or MPS III. Kids with MPS III--short for mucopolysaccharidosis--lack an enzyme necessary for breaking down natural sugars in the body. As Waverly's father, Matt, explains, "It's essentiall...
WAMU 88.5
Dr. Ross Fletcher isn't just the chief of staff at D.C.'s Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He's also an off-Broadway star. He's currently appearing in GATZ, Elevator Repair Service's groundbreaking theatrical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, now playing at New York's Public Theater. Over the course of seven-odd hours, including two intermissions and a dinn...
WAMU 88.5
Back in 1999, D.C.-raised playwright Becky Mode premiered a one-man show called Fully Committed. Mode used to work in the restaurant business, where she'd hear insiders describe a booked-up eatery as "fully committed." So her play follows the harried hijinks of an overworked reservationist named Sam, who mans the phones at an exclusive French brasserie in New York. Washington ...
WAMU 88.5
Hamlecchino: Clown Prince of Denmark is a new version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and combines hearing performers from the John Aniello Award-winning theater company, Faction of Fools, with students from Gallaudet, the federally-chartered university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Last year, as the Fools kicked off their third season, they became artists-in-reside...
WAMU 88.5
Over the past two years, a good day for Washingtonian Em Hall would go something like this: "I might take the 80 downtown, then catch the 40 up to the G2 and go over to Georgetown, and then catch the 30 and head up to Chevy Chase, then get on the Red Line and come back and hop on the H3 and then I'm back in my neighborhood." Because in February 2010, the Bloomingdale r...
WAMU 88.5
Ragtime is undergoing a resurgence, quite literally at the hands of a self-taught pianist in Alexandria. Martin Spitznagel nabbed the title of World Champion of Old-Time Piano Playing at the 2011 World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest, which he describes as "this fabulous collection of really creative, eccentric people who get together in a ballroom in Peoria, Ill., and dre...