Your Hometown Virtual Conversation with Suzanne Vega

In the latest edition of our Your Hometown virtual series, celebrated singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega talks to host Kevin Burke about her role as a leading figure of the folk-music revival of the early 1980s in NYC and her unique career as masterful storyteller who “observes the world with a clinically poetic eye” (New York Times). 

This is a virtual event which will take place via Zoom. Registrants will receive a link in advance of the event. 

For more information about the Your Hometown series of virtual conversations, click here. 

About the Guest:
Suzanne Vega was born in Santa Monica, CA, but grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York City. She found a heady mix of multicultural music playing at home: Motown, bossa nova, jazz and folk. At age 11 she picked up a guitar and as a teenager she started to write songs. Vega went on to become a leading figure of the folk-music revival of the early 1980s when, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she sang what has been called contemporary folk or neo-folk songs of her own creation in Greenwich Village clubs. Since the release of her self-titled, critically acclaimed 1985 debut album, she has given sold-out concerts in many of the world’s best-known venues. Her most recent album is An Evening of New York Songs and Stories.

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). 

About Your Hometown:
Your Hometown is a live event and podcast series conceived and hosted by historian Kevin Burke in which prominent and everyday guests from a diversity of generations, geographies, and fields are 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 draws on 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.