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...

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 par...

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,...

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 hometo...

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 roc...

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 State...

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 neighbor...

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 f...

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...

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, startin...

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. Shar...

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...

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...

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 fro...

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...

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 ag...

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 w...

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...

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...

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.