Your Hometown

Glenn Ligon is a renowned artist who gives us new ways of seeing American history, literature, and society. How can we see him better through the lens of childhood? In this episode of Your Hometown, Glenn speaks with Kevin Burke about his experiences growing up in the South Bronx in the 1960s and 70s, including his hour-and-a-half commute each way to Walden, the private school he attended on the Upper West Side from the first grade on. His mother made going to Walden possible for Glenn and...

This is the story of an “inquiring mind” who happens to be a journalist. Sewell Chan is the new editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune. But before his move to Austin, and before his previous roles at the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, he was a kid growing up in an immigrant family in the outer boroughs of New York City, where his father drove a taxicab. Both his parents had seen a lot in their lives – but said little. Their New York was the New York of work, of their...

Tiffany Cabán captured national headlines when she came within a hair’s breadth of winning the primary for district attorney in her hometown of Queens, New York, in 2019. It was an audacious move: a young, out-of-nowhere candidate running in her home borough against the establishment on a platform calling for major changes to the system. Snatching a moral victory from the jaws of electoral defeat, Tiffany kept speaking out. Two years later, she’s just won a seat on the New York City Council,...

David Johansen is one of the all-time front men in music and an artist who keeps changing the game – not by degrees but by solar systems. In the 1980s, he had everyone feeling “Hot, Hot, Hot” as Buster Poindexter. Then he showed up as the taxi-driving Ghost of Christmas Past in the Bill Murray film Scrooged. Before all this, he was the glammed-up lead singer of The New York Dolls, the mythic rock band of the downtown NYC scene of the 1970s. Hard rock, punk rock, glam rock, heavy metal – the...

Part two of David Johansen’s Your Hometown episode is the portrait of an artist in the process of becoming. If Staten Island was the setting of David’s coming of age, Manhattan would him into his next act. Hear David talk with host Kevin Burke about living in the East Village, the early days of the New York Dolls, the birth of Buster Poindexter, and performing at the Café Carlyle. David’s hometown journey is an invitation to dive into what it means to be an artist and to find what in their...

Chef Priyanka Naik is a self-taught vegan cook, Food Network champion, social media influencer, and author of the cookbook, The Modern Tiffin. In this episode, host Kevin Burke talks to Priyanka about her New York story. How did growing up on the South Shore of Staten Island as the daughter of immigrant parents shape her senses—and her sense of home and the world. What about being a kid on Staten Island drew Priyanka closer to her roots in India? What sparked her passion for taking her...

Sonia Manzano is one of the most influential voices in the history of public television. For more than 40 years, she was our neighbor, Maria, on Sesame Street, and she continues to connect her experiences and imagination through her new show for PBS Kids, Alma’s Way. In Part Two of her Your Hometown episode, she talks with host Kevin Burke about how she made her way from her coming of age in the South Bronx to Sesame Street and how the real and fictional maps of those neighborhoods – one...

Emmy-winning writer and actress Sonia Manzano, who played “Maria” on Sesame Street for more than 40 years, talks to host Kevin Burke about growing up in the South Bronx and how she draws on the “love and chaos” of her childhood to teach children—something she’s still doing through her new animated series for PBS Kids, Alma’s Way. Filmed in Manhattan and Queens, Sesame Street wasn’t that far from Sonia’s own hometown in New York City. Sesame Street is a fictional place that evokes city...

Suzanne Vega is that rare singer-songwriter whose work becomes part of the soundtrack of their hometown -- in her case, New York City. In this episode, Suzanne illuminates her childhood in East Harlem in the 1970s and how her experiences of the city, inside and out, flow through her work, even as she embraces the freedom to write from different perspectives. Suzanne's latest album is "An Evening of New York Songs and Stories," and as she discusses such songs as "Luka," "Gypsy," "Tom's...

Sherrilyn Ifill walks into court with history behind her as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund. It’s the legal arm of the civil rights movement, and Sherrilyn is in its vanguard. Her hometown is Jamaica, Queens, a neighborhood in New York City where she grew up in the 1960s and '70s. That’s what Kevin Burke explores with her in this conversation, starting with the first question Sherrilyn asks whenever she takes on a new legal case: “Tell me about...

Our guest is the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose activism has made him a fixture in the press for decades in his hometown of New York City. Lately, though, we often see him as the eulogist at funeral after funeral of those taken too soon through violence. He does it with enormous grace and power, including after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. And there’s a reason for that. As Rev. Sharpton explains to Kevin Burke in this rare interview, there’s a traumatic incident that happened...

Maria Bartiromo anchors three different shows on the Fox Business Network and Fox News Channel and was the first TV reporter to broadcast live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She doesn’t come from the world of CEOs, however. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, she was a kid growing up in Dyker Heights and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where she worked the coat check at her father’s restaurant and catering hall, The Rex Manor. Her whole family pitched in there, including her mother, who...

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the most well-known scientists on the planet. In addition to authoring numerous books, he hosts the wildly popular podcast, StarTalk, and has helped revive the epic TV series Cosmos that originated with Carl Sagan, whom he met when he was in high school. Neil is also the director of the world-renowned Hayden Planetarium, part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space that he helped launch at the American Museum of Natural History in his hometown of New York City....

In an industry where most startups go up, down, and disappear, Danielle Guizio is a New York-based fashion designer on Forbes’s 30 under 30 list. If you think of the biggest celebrities on the style pages today, you’re likely to find a photo of them wearing her designs. She describes the line – which shares her name, Danielle Guizio – as “celebrating the modern-day woman who aims to deviate from the traditional and push boundaries in all aspects of life.” She has even revived the corset,...

Lynn Nottage is the first woman ever to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, and she’s one of the most important voices writing for the stage and screen today, with works that include Infinite Apparel, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Ruined, Sweat, and MJ: The Musical, an upcoming show on the life of Michael Jackson. She often writes about characters in private, intimate spaces, where and how real people really talk. It’s a process that began in her hometown of New York City, where she was a...

Sigourney Weaver is one of the greatest movie stars of all time, and many of us think of her as the tough, no-nonsense screen heroines she has played in films from Alien to Avatar. But that’s not how she saw herself as a girl growing up in Manhattan, where she was Susan, the shy, bookish daughter of a dynamic set of parents in that whirling scene of trailblazers in television’s first golden age. In this revealing episode, hear how she found empowerment roaming the streets of New York and...

Richard Price is a writer’s writer, with novels that include The Wanderers, Clockers, Freedomland, and Lush Life. He’s also collaborated on such landmark television series as HBO’s The Wire, The Night Of, The Deuce, and The Outsider. Hear him talk with Kevin Burke about how New York City is better understood as a series of hometowns and how growing up in the Bronx shaped him as a writer of human drama and dialogue in stories set in the gritty landscapes of urban America. Your Hometown is...

This is part 2 of a “double-album” interview with Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, who grew up in Hollis, Queens in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, where he became one of three founding members of the Hall of Fame hip-hop group, Run-DMC. Hear DMC talk about his childhood passion for comic books, how they introduced him to his hometown of New York City and inspired his creativity as a rapper, and how they ultimately informed his search for meaning and identity as the adopted son of Byford and Banna...

In the first of a two-part interview, Kevin Burke speaks with Darryl McDaniels, the legendary hip-hop artist from Hollis, Queens, where he and his two friends formed one of the truly pioneering groups in American music: Run-DMC. Darryl was the “DMC” in that equation, and together with Joseph “Run” Simmons and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, he put Hollis on the map for an entire generation. Before then, Hollis was the neighborhood where they were kids growing up in homes and on streets where...

Hear from our host, Kevin Burke, on the importance of telling the stories of the highs, lows, and unforgettable moments of childhood through Your Hometown.