After six years covering Capitol Hill for a Los Angeles public radio station, Kitty Felde found a way to branch out to a new audience: middle schoolers. Once a month on her talk show, adults would be “thrown out” and students would come to her studio to chat about books.
“Management hated it and of course the kids loved it,” Felde said in an interview.
The idea had first come to Felde at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books while she was manning a booth for her NPR affiliate, KPCC. Parents approached Felde and told her how much they enjoyed her show, while their children complained about being stuck listening to public radio in carpools. Felde asked the kids what they wanted to hear about, and they said books and reading.
Felde hosted her children’s book segment for KPCC and an L.A. cable show until she later relocated to DC, reporting on politics for KPCC’s new outpost in the nation’s capital. But when KPCC eventually closed all of its political bureaus, she returned to the idea of kids programming.
In 2015, Felde started her new podcast, Book Club for Kids. Four years into it now, she’s logged dozens of episodes with local schoolkids and won numerous accolades, including a 2017 DC Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities and a nod as one of the top 10 podcasts for children by The Times of London.
Felde produced her podcast from the DC area for three years when she lived in Southwest DC. Even after returning to Los Angeles in 2018, she continues to travel to Washington regularly and record episodes at local DC schools, with her next visit planned for late fall or early winter.
To find her young panelists, Felde reaches out to schools and libraries in DC and its suburbs. “I find a teacher or librarian willing to wrangle kids,” she said. “They get three kids to read a middle-grade novel by an author we haven’t already discussed.” Later, Felde shows up with a microphone to record with them.
In each 20-minute episode, the students discuss a particular young-adult book, ranging from classics (like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl) to contemporary (like Divergent by Veronica Roth and The First Rule of Punk by Celia Perez). If the book is modern, Felde later hunts down the author to interview them, typically via Skype, and includes clips of that in the podcast. At this point, the website has an archive of about 90 episodes.
Each episode features a celebrity guest who reads excerpts of the book. “We’ve had everyone from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to former spy Valerie Plame. We’ve had an L.A. Laker and a whole bunch of people from Capitol Hill because that’s what I used to cover,” Felde said.
The Capitol Hill names have included Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent, and California Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat. Former U.S. Education Secretary John B. King Jr., now president and CEO of The Education Trust, also paid a visit. Local guests have included DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ward 6 DC Council member Charles Allen.
The podcast has also featured actors like Josh Malina from The West Wing and Scandal and John Michael Higgins from the Pitch Perfect movies.
Felde likens her podcast to “an adult book club without the alcohol.” Although discussions start with the book itself, “inevitably the conversation takes a left turn and the kids go off on some topic.”
She pointed to instances involving schools on Capitol Hill and in Fairfax County, Virginia — both relatively safe areas, she said — where kids expressed uneasiness about the prospect of school shootings, but also complained about repeated emergency drills as well as their parents’ overprotectiveness. It didn’t help that they’d sometimes see police officers on Capitol Hill wearing Kevlar vests and carrying submachine guns, the kids told her.
In the episode for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the #MeToo movement came up. Another time, Felde said, students in Anacostia “talked about their resentment as to how the rest of the city sees Anacostia as a dangerous place and not a place with real people and real families.”
The Book Club for Kids generally posts new episodes every other Wednesday. In the weeks between, bonus episodes feature extended conversations with the writers or discussions revolving around the question, “What’s your favorite book?” It’s a question Felde asks everyone everywhere, she said. She takes call-ins from children for those bonus episodes.
Felde said her favorite episode was the one for The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, featuring five fifth-grade boys from Watkins Elementary School on Capitol Hill. “Usually we work with three children and these boys were wired!” she said.
When Felde first walked into the library at Watkins, the boys were literally climbing the bookshelves. She immediately thought the worst. In the end, the students talked quite eloquently about the book, which explored sibling relationships.
One boy shared how he couldn’t wait for his older sister to go to college — but then felt sad when she left. Another talked about his dad, who worked for Amtrak, and how he worried about him when he was away. Tears were shed and the boys finished the podcast with an a cappella song they wrote about the book.
“Kids like to be podcast stars,” Felde said. “They like that their opinions are being valued and heard. … That’s enormously valuable to a kid.”
Recently, Felde — who is also an accomplished playwright — took her love for YA fiction to a new level. She published her first book in March, a mystery set on Capitol Hill. She’ll add a related podcast next month, according to her website.
Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza follows a 10-year-old girl who moves to the city from California to live with her father, a member of Congress. Upon learning of a legend known as the “Demon Cat of Capitol Hill,” Fina launches an investigation of the reputedly cursed creature.
Felde describes the book — newly named by Reader’s Favorite as its 2019 silver medalist in the children’s mystery category — as an “outsider’s view of Washington.” Its title character, though, was actually inspired by a girl named Fina Martinez whom Felde had mentored in Los Angeles.
“We were trying to get this girl into college, but she didn’t need my help,” Felde said. “This was a child who was determined to get to college. I just sort of helped her along the way.”
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