Seán Collins has been a Benedictine monk, a network news producer, a community organizer, and a cook. He also sold books for awhile. In fact, it was the job in the bookstore that got him interested in radio. He worked at NPR for almost 20 years, producing All Things Considered and Weekend Edition Saturday, managing coverage of everything from political conventions and the attacks on 11 September 2001, to the day a hundred-year-old cheese sandwich was found behind a cushion in a sofa in London.

In 2008, he served as a judge of the Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago. Really, his only other claim to fame is that he once rode in an elevator with Ella Fitzgerald. He lives in Saint Louis, roots for the Cardinals, and reads a lot of poetry. Collins sometimes wonders whether he should have stayed in the monastery, but they didn’t allow radios and he’s grown fond of the medium.