Damon Williams ’14 and Daniel Kisslinger ’14

Joe Engleman ’14

Beginning in the summer of 2015, Damon Williams ’14 and Daniel Kisslinger ’14 could be heard on Chicago’s WHPK radio station with their show AirGo. Seven years and 300 episodes later, AirGo continues to create a living dialogue-based archive of Chicago’s creative communities and social movements.

AirGo started “as a love letter to a very specific context,” Williams says, the combined wave of poets, spoken word, and hip-hop artists, and “radical upsurge of people throwing down politically” in Chicago. The intention was to create a kind of archive while documenting and building the kind of Chicago and wider world that they both wanted to see.

“It felt like we were observing people in Chicago who were historically significant, and we wanted to make sure that that there was at least an hourlong time capsule of people in this community processing their life, experiences, and what developed their relationship to the world,” Williams says.

The Grinnell diaspora portion of AirGo features interviews with Shanna Benjamin, former Grinnell associate professor of English, and two conversations with Kesho Scott, associate professor of sociology and American studies.

“You’ll get a conversation about the space of Grinnell — how it shaped us and shaped our work,” Williams says.

 

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