New Original Podcast “Wilder” Debuts At 2023 Tribeca Film Festival

  iHeartPodcasts has announced that Wilder, a new original podcast exploring the life and legacy of American author Laura Ingalls Wilder, will premiere at Tribeca Film Festival as part of the 2023 audio storytelling lineup.  

Named one of Vulture’s “Top Podcasts We Can’t Wait to Listen to This Summer,” Wilder centers on the life and legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the great American storyteller. Since the first Little House on The Prairie book was published in 1932, generations of readers have flocked to Wilder’s cozy stories of the Ingalls’ family settling the Western frontier. The series inspired a TV show, (Little House on The Prairie) pageants and entire fashion lines. Behind this franchise is a woman who experienced almost a full century of American history.

Wilder made her first trips in a covered wagon and later flew on a jet plane. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life and legacy remain as powerful, mesmerizing, controversial and violent as the America she represents. In a country currently at odds with itself and its history could there be a better time for an exploration of this woman? 

The podcast host is Glynnis MacNicol, who is a writer, speaker, digital media consultant and podcast editor who lives in New York City. Her memoir, No One Tells You This, was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by Esquire, the Financial Times and was a 2019 New York Times 'Paperback Row' pick.

Of course, a famous person's legacy is almost always a complicated affair. Even the legacy of Mother Theresa has undergone scrutiny.

In 2018, a division of the American Library Association voted to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s literature award over concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award was renamed as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association released a statement defending Wilder’s work, saying that while her writing included “the perspectives of racism that were representative of her time and place,” it also made “positive contributions to children’s literature.”

While the controversy appears to have subsided, in some instances, racist passages in the “Little House” series were amended in newer editions by booksellers. 

Wilder was released on June 8, 2023, with new episodes launching every Thursday.