The Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall in Toronto has announced its 2023–24 concert season—the venue’s fifteenth anniversary season—including performances from Rhiannon Giddens, Brad Mehldau, Laurie Anderson, Kronos Quartet, and Richard Goode.

Congratulations to Rhiannon Giddens, who received an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Princeton University at the commencement ceremony this morning. "Named by NPR as one of the 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century, she has dedicated her career to raising up voices that have been overlooked or erased," says the school. "Few contemporary artists have done more to connect overlooked musical traditions of America’s past with music being performed today."

Rhiannon Giddens’ You’re the One, her third solo studio album and her first of all original songs, is due August 18. This collection of twelve tunes written over the course of her career bursts with life-affirming energy, drawing from the folk music she knows so deeply and its pop descendants. The album was produced by Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Alicia Keys, Valerie June) and recorded in Miami with a ten- to twelve-person ensemble including Giddens’ closest musical collaborators from the past decade and a horn section. The lone featured guest on the album is Jason Isbell on "Yet to Be." The album's title track is out today; you can watch the lyric video here. Giddens will lead the biggest headlining shows of her career to celebrate the album's release.

Congratulations to Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, who have won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for their opera Omar. Based on the life and autobiography of enslaved Muslim scholar Omar Ibn Said, who was forcefully brought to Charleston from Africa in 1807, Omar premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston in May 2022 and has been performed by LA Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Boston Lyric Opera; it will be performed by San Francisco Opera in November.

“We have this tendency to group ourselves, but then we also have this ability—through music, through dance, through food—to come together and make something new,” Rhiannon Giddens says on the PBS mini-series The Articulate Hour hosted by Jim Cotter. The episode delves into humans' contrasting needs for community and solitude and includes a conversation with Giddens and performances by her and Francesco Turrisi. You can watch it here, along with the second episode of her own PBS series My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, with guest Allison Russell.

The new series My Music with Rhiannon Giddens premiered on PBS stations across the US this week. In the inaugural episode, Rhiannon Giddens visits with three lifelong friends: Justin Robinson, one of her fellow Carolina Chocolate Drops co-founders; her sister, singer Lalenja Harrington; and singer-songwriter Laurelyn Dossett. You can watch it here.

Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley, has announced its 2023–24 concert season, including performances by Brad Mehldau (both solo and with his Trio), Cécile McLorin Salvant, Kronos Quartet, Rhiannon Giddens with Silkroad Ensemble, and Attacca Quartet.

Rhiannon Giddens will host a new series on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, produced by the team behind the long-running PBS series David Holt’s State of Music. In seven half-hour weekly episodes, beginning the week of May 1, Giddens hosts musical performances and conversations with guest artists filmed on location around the South, including Allison Russell, Rissi Palmer, Charly Lowry, Adia Victoria, Joy Clark, Francesco Turrisi, Justin Robinson, Lalenja Harrington, and Laurelyn Dossett.

Rhiannon Giddens and Molly Tuttle are featured in a new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit American Currents: State of the Music, which highlights significant developments in country music over the past year. The exhibit opened at the Nashville museum last night and runs until February 2024. Tuttle's display includes her grandfather's guitar and the clothing pictured on the cover of her Grammy-winning album Crooked Tree; Giddens's celebrates her Grammy-winning album They're Calling Me Home; her Carnegie Hall Perspectives series; her debut book, Build a House; and her opera Omar.

Rhiannon Giddens’s second book, We Could Fly, is due October 10, from Candlewick Press. The picture book, a companion to her debut book, Build a House, released last October, gives wing to a tale of grace and transcendence, with illustrations by acclaimed artist Briana Mukodiri Uchendu. The new book draws on lyrics from the song “We Could Fly,” which Giddens wrote with Dirk Powell and recorded for her 2017 Nonesuch album, Freedom Highway. It draws on a heritage of African folklore for a dialogue between a mother and daughter, paired with illustrations that celebrate love, resilience, and the spiritual power of the “old-time ways”—tradition and shared cultural memory—to sustain and uplift.

Rhiannon Giddens addressed an audience at The Juilliard School’s Glorya Kaufman Dance Studio on January 23 for the tenth annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Speaker Series at Juilliard, where she is a Creative Associate. Giddens, who opens her speech with a performance of the traditional tune “Pretty Saro,” centers the talk around artists' responsibility to themselves, their creative process, and their community. You can watch it here.

Rhiannon Giddens is on Speaking Soundly, a podcast in which host and MET Opera Principal Trumpet David Krauss talks with fellow performers about their creative process and lives as artists. “In addition to being expert in the music, you’re steeping in the history behind the music,” Krauss says. “And then you compose a song to capture that history and use it as a lens to focus in on what’s really happening in our society today. That’s a lot.” You can hear their conversation here.