Arts & Culture

MN Reads

Join us Thursday mornings at 8:20 for Minnesota Reads on Northland Morning, featuring Minnesota authors talking about their work. Funding provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund

MN Reads: "The Brave" by James Bird

The North 103.3 | By Lisa Johnson

Published May 13, 2021 at 9:53 AM CDT

James Bird kind of likes to right - or write - past wrongs.

When the director/screenwriter (We Are Boats, Honeyglue) decided to follow a longtime yen to write for and inspire kids the way books, music and movies inspired him, in The Brave, he gave himself the Minnesota childhood he felt he missed out on.

Bird quit school in California and moved to Duluth in 10th grade, to complete the circle for the Minnesota-born mom who was kicked out of a Duluth high school in her own freshman year. And soon, he hopes to reunite his mother with the family and hometown she loved.

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Lisa Johnson

Lisa Johnson started her broadcast career anchoring the television news at her high school and spinning country music at KWWK/KOLM Radio in Rochester, Minnesota. She was a reporter and news anchor at KTHI in Fargo, ND (not to mention the host of a children's program called "Lisa's Lane") and a radio reporter and anchor in Moorhead, Bismarck, Wahpeton and Fergus Falls.Since 1991, she has hosted Northland Morning on KUMD. One of the best parts of her job includes "paying it forward" by mentoring upcoming journalists and broadcasters on the student news team that helps produce Northland Morning. She also loves introducing the different people she meets in her job to one another, helping to forge new "community connections" and partnerships.Lisa has amassed a book collection weighing over two tons, and she enjoys reading, photography, volunteering with Animal Allies Humane Society and fantasizing about farmland. She goes to bed at 8pm, long before her daughter, two cats, or three dogs.

See stories by Lisa Johnson