Michele Norris

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is finishing a run on her latest work, "Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1,2 & 3)" at The Public Theater in New York.

A huge hit upon its release, the 1949 musical South Pacific still resonates with contributors to The Race Card Project — particularly a song about how prejudice is learned, not innate.

For the last three years, NPR's Michele Norris has asked people to share their six-word stories about race and cultural identity. The confrontation in Sanford, Fla., has been a running thread in the inbox of the Race Card Project since Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in 2012.

On June 11, 1963, Gov. George Wallace stood at the University of Alabama to block two black students attempting to cross the color line and register for classes. The event forever associated him with segregation. His daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, 63, is trying to shake that link.

Long before James Prosek became a world-famous artist and naturalist, he was a kid who used art as a way to work through the ups and downs of childhood. "When I went into the woods, it was the first time that I felt like something was mine," he says.

In 1877, Anna Sewell wrote a novel about human kindness and cruelty — all from the point of view of a horse. In the decades since, Black Beauty has been embraced by generations of children, and has helped change the way we treat and think about horses.

Author Nadine Cohodas has written a new biography of singer Nina Simone. It's called Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, and it tells the story of the singer's evolution from classical pianist to civil rights icon. Read about Simone's musical beginnings in an excerpt from the book here.

Last year, the popular, albeit unauthorized online version of Scrabble disappeared in a puff of lawsuits — leaving hundreds of thousands of word enthusiasts in the lurch. Now, the creators of Scrabulous have quietly relaunched a new version of the game — but Scrabble guru Stefan Fatsis says it won't cut it for the purists.

The 2008 presidential race was many things to many people, but almost everyone agrees that it was long — epic even. So what better way to tell the story of the past political year than in an epic poem? That's where Calvin Trillin's Deciding the Next Decider comes in.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison says she wanted to "remove race from slavery" in her new novel. Set in 17th century America, A Mercy features black, white and Native American characters in different degrees of servitude.