NPR's Michele Norris, host of "All Things Considered," will take this summer off to work on a book of essays about race in America. She announced this at the end of her show Friday (h/t NYO).

The book is tentatively titled "Say What?" and Norris says in an interview with the New York Observer, "People talk about race one way in public and they often- not always but often- talk about it in a different way and at a different tempo in the private sphere... And I just want to pull back the curtain a little bit."

Norris will travel around the country this summer as research for the book, making her first stop to see and interview her family in Alabama. Her NPR co-hosts Melissa Block and Robert Siegel, as well as Madeline Brand whose show Day to Day was canceled on NPR last December, will fill in for Norris until mid-September.

Read more of this New York Observer interview here.