“I think part of why I’ve never left the Bronx is maybe being stubborn, but I also didn’t want to feel as though I had been driven away, and that’s what a lot of people have said. There’s something very life-giving about being in the Bronx. It’s very interesting. It’s a little bit edgy. It kinda keeps you on your toes, sometimes in a bad way, but mostly in a good way. My husband and I have this cute little house, and there’s been a lot of tender loving care in that house. I just feel rooted or planted here, it’s a really special place to me. There’s a book that I read a long time ago, called Cape Fear Rising by Philip Gerard, and it took place around the time of Jim Crow. It’s about this woman who has come from someplace else and she lives with her husband in Cape Fear. And she has this experience where she went home, wherever home was, and she has this realization. She says, ‘When you’re raised in a place, the landscape enters your body. No matter where you lived your life, what lovely exotic lands you visited, your body craved the landscape of your youth. Your eyes and ears measured everything else against it.’ When I read that paragraph, I said, that’s it! That’s how I feel. I love traveling to unusual places, but I love to come home to my little house and feel home.”

Interview Conducted by Megan Dreher