Your Hometown – Details, episodes & analysis

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Your Hometown

Your Hometown Podcast

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/0d. Total Eps: 20

Our hometowns – and the years we spend there growing up – loom large and cast long shadows. Whether we stay, move away, or eventually come back, they mark a permanent geography within our very beings. Our experiences there are foundational, our memories of them visceral – their needle ready to drop – and, in the rearview … they’re almost mythic. In this series, I want to discover where we’re from and when we’re from and how that unique crossroads in our coming of age years shapes us forever. One guest. One interview. One hometown at a time.

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Glenn Ligon – The Bronx

Season 1 · Episode 19

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 01:16:18

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 his brother, and it involved sacrifices and risks. A commute is one thing. Where it can lead, another.

How would this change the landscape for Glenn and his family? Where would Glenn most feel at home, outside and inside, in his New York? Where would he feel safe, or watched, or like a stranger? And how does a city like New York, with its layer upon layer of construction, class, and culture, define not just the literal paths we take growing up, but the existential ones?

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Sewell Chan – Queens

Season 1 · Episode 18

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 59:05

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 community, and of striving for a quiet, peaceful place to live, which ended up being in Queens. Yet when you meet Sewell, it’s surprising that he came from such a quiet place, because he’s so engaged with the world, with history, with how people live and how things work. In this episode, Kevin Burke talks with Sewell about his coming-of-age years in New York, the meaning of home, and what the windows and doors were from where his family lived out to the larger world.

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Tiffany Cabán – Queens

Season 1 · Episode 17

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 01:12:47

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, where she will have a voice in the debate about what kind of hometown New York wants to be.

In this interview, host Kevin Burke talks with Tiffany about her coming-of-age story and what she experienced back there that made her someone who gets up and chooses to march on the front lines, has the skills to organize – and then has the fire in her soul to throw her whole being into fighting for what she believes in. This is a show about diving down to the first act in the life of a person – in this case, a person who sees something and is moved to do something about it. It’s a search for the people in her life who saw her and did something, and how she learned to stand up for herself and for others.

In a larger sense, it’s also about grace—the kind of mercy and compassionate understanding we find ourselves asking for and being asked to give in our lives—and whether that kind of grace, born of experience, can become the foundation for how we relate to each other.

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David Johansen Part 2 – Staten Island

Season 1 · Episode 16

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 49:07

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 origins stories is knowable and what remains enigmatic – even to them – as they continue looking around the corner, following their instincts and their muses.

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David Johansen Part 1 – Staten Island

Season 1 · Episode 15

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 55:36

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 Dolls sit atop a lot of family trees. To this day, whatever room he walks into, from loft spaces to the swanky Café Carlyle, David Johansen owns it.

In part one of this epic two-part interview, David talks with host Kevin Burke about coming of age on Staten Island in the 1950s and ’60s, a kid riding bikes, buying and listening to records, going to Catholic School, joining a band, and graduating from high school at the height of the Vietnam War. How did he get from the house his grandfather built on the North Shore to the pulsating East Village at the dawn of an era he’d help define? This is the origin story of a true original.

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Chef Priyanka Naik – Staten Island

Season 1 · Episode 14

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 52:26

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 family’s traditional recipes and putting her own modern spin on them? And what is the deeper source of her creativity, drive, and sense of daring to put herself “out there” in print and on camera as a virtual one-woman show?

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Sonia Manzano Part 2 - The South Bronx

Season 1 · Episode 13

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 53:07

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 real, one imaginary – overlapped inside of her and in the TV worlds she created for us. As a magical storyteller, Sonia knows just where to go in her memories for that powerful combination of laughter amid pathos – the funny in the sad, the lessons in the every-day.

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Sonia Manzano Part 1 - The South Bronx

Season 1 · Episode 12

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 52:42

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 life from the stoop to the subway and apartments above stores. But Sonia grew up in the very real place of the South Bronx—most vividly on Third Avenue near Crotona Park. How different was Sonia’s New York from the one she helped to create as Maria? On our TVs, Sonia gave us something we needed: a feeling of love and safety, empathy and imagination. Where did she find these things when she was a kid?

This is a two-part episode. In the first part, Sonia takes us from the world of Sesame Street—actually, her audition—back to her beginnings in the South Bronx. And in part two, she explains how she got from the Bronx to Sesame Street and lived a second childhood as an adult with experiences to share. So, “come and play” and “sweep the clouds away” – by listening to one of the truest teachers you’ll find in New York or any hometown.

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Suzanne Vega – East Harlem / Upper West Side, Manhattan

Season 1 · Episode 11

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 01:10:16

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 Diner,” and “Zephyr & I,” we meet an artist fully alive to the truths of her coming of age and to the souls that linger in an urban landscape layered by time and memory.

In particular, when “Luka,” a song about child abuse from a young boy’s point of view, was first released in the 1980s, Suzanne shied away from questions about whether she was writing from experience or imagination. Not only was it a matter of artistic principle, but as she reveals, she also was afraid of what her stepfather, the novelist Ed Vega, might think. All these years later, Suzanne talks as never before about her personal connections to “Luka” and how its truth spoke to other people’s truths.

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Sherrilyn Ifill – Jamaica, Queens

Season 1 · Episode 10

Thursday, March 21, 2024 • Duration 01:05:10

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 the history of this place.” That’s because she knows every town has one: the layers of time, buried and built over, that reveal why things are the way they are, from the bulldozing of Black neighborhoods to make way for highways to brutal acts of violence like lynchings, erased from the public square and, over time, memory. Sherrilyn wants us to see these scars of history all around us and how they impact the struggle for equal justice in America. She’s compared this process of discovery to swallowing the red pill in the sci-fi action film, The Matrix. Once you see the past in the present, you can’t unsee it. What is the connection between Sherrilyn’s civil rights work and her powerful personal story and all she experienced in her New York? Join us at the intersection of place, time, and memory for another episode of Your Hometown.

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Your Hometown – Details, episodes & analysis

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Your Hometown – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

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Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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Latest published episodes

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Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify