The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep.

In this hour Henri Langlois’ legendary Cinémathéque in Paris, The Keeper of the National Archives, Nancy Pearl: the first librarian action figure, The Dark Side of the Dewey Decimal System and stories of Prince’s epic vault in Minneapolis and the Lenny Bruce Archive.

Today, we're thinking about Marcyliena Morgan, a keeper extraordinaire, a linguistic anthropologist who founded and championed the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard.

Marcyliena Hazel Morgan was born in Chicago, May 8, 1950 and passed away September 28, 2025. We were fortunate to interview her in 2018 as part of the opening story in our NPR series The Keepers, about activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections they keep. Guardians of history large and small, protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Individuals who take it upon themselves to preserve some part of our cultural heritage. Marcyliena Morgan was all that and more.

Our story delves into the the founding of the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard by Dr. Morgan and Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to “facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, scholarship and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”

You’ll hear from Professor Morgan, Professor Gates, Nas, Patrick Douthit aka 9th Wonder, an array of Harvard archivists and students studying at the archive as well as the records, music and voices being preserved there. We've also included more of our original interview with Dr. Morgan.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We're part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

The worlds of a young Canadian immigrant, an Italian pasta-making family, and a 70-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide converge in this story of the San Francisco Treat.

A Canadian woman, Lois DeDomenico, marries an Italian immigrant, Tom DeDomenico, whose family founded Golden Grain Macaroni in San Francisco. Just after WWII, the newlyweds rent a room from an elderly Armenian woman, Pailadzo Captanian, who teaches the young, pregnant, 18-year-old Lois how to cook — including how to make yogurt, baklava, and pilaf.

During those hours in the kitchen, the old Armenian woman tells Lois the story of her life — her forced trek from Turkey to Syria, leaving her two young sons with a Greek family, her husband’s murder, the birth of her baby along the way (his name means “child of pain”), the story of the genocide. Mrs. Captanian shows Lois a book she wrote shortly after her experiences — one of the only eyewitness accounts written at the time. Most survivor accounts were published 30–40 years later. Hers was published in 1919 for the Paris Peace Talks, in hopes that it would help provide context for the establishment of an Armenian state.

Years after the DeDomenicos move away from Mrs. Captanian’s home, Tom’s brother is having dinner at the young couple’s house. He looks down at the pilaf Lois made and says, “This would be good in a box.” They name it Rice-A-Roni.