Your Hometown

In “Your Hometown,” an innovative new live event and podcast series conceived and hosted by historian Kevin Burke, prominent and everyday guests from a diversity of generations, geographies, and fields will be interviewed about when and where they grew up and how that intersection of time and place shaped them. Rooted in a deep sense of place, time, and memory, the series will utilize the power of storytelling to underscore the importance of hometowns at a time when many, due to breathtaking advances in technology, feel placeless, empathy is at a deficit, and polarization is extreme. 

About the Host:
Kevin Burke is the founder and CEO of Kevin Burke Productions, Inc., a New York–based film company, and director of research at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. With Henry Louis Gates Jr., Burke is co-author of the book And Still I Rise: Black America since MLK (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015) and co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (W. W. Norton & Co., 2016). Burke’s film credits include working as the senior story producer on the popular genealogy series Finding Your Roots, now in its sixth season on PBS, and Reconstruction: America after the Civil War (PBS, 2019), winner of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. He also was a senior historical adviser on the Emmy Award–nominated Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise (PBS, 2016) and Africa’s Great Civilizations (PBS, 2017).