Whether weaving hours of recordings into an aural tapestry that makes the lives of Bowery flophouse residents real and immediate, or collaborating with black youth in a Chicago ghetto to help them tell the story of their lives, or rescuing long-forgotten Yiddish radio programs, David Isay compels us to listen—and to care. Isay is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's news-magazines. Over the past ten years his radio documentary and feature work has won almost every award in broadcasting including: two Peabodies, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and two Livingston Awards for young journalists. He has also received the Prix Italia (Europe's oldest and most distinguished broadcasting honor), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994). Just this year (2000), Isay received the highly prestigious MacArthur "genius" Award, an unrestricted fellowship awarded in recognition of his "extraordinary originality and dedication" and his "capacity for self-direction." The Foundation described his achievements in these terms:

In 1994, Isay established Sound Portraits Productions, a not-for-profit production company dedicated to creating radio that brings rarely heard American voices to a national audience. Often produced in collaboration with those whose stories they tell, the documentaries of Isay and the Sound Portraits production team represent some of the most exciting and innovative audio documentary work produced in the U.S. today. Sound Portraits is an important and growing contributor to Talking History, a radio program produced at the History Department of the University at Albany and airing on WRPI every Thursday morning from 10-11 a.m. (also broadcast live over the WWW at www.wrpi.org and available at the Talking History Web site www.talkinghistory.org).

In addition to his radio production work, Isay has published a number of essays and books based on his documentaries, including Holding On (1996), Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (1997), and the just released Flophouse (2000) with photos by Harvey Wang, based on Sunshine Hotel, a chronicle of the lives of residents of a Bowery flophouse.