Your Mama’s Kitchen with your host, Michele Norris
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“Tell me about your mama’s kitchen.”
That’s the simple request which begins each episode of this Audible Original podcast from acclaimed journalist Michele Norris (NPR’s All ThingsConsidered, The Washington Post) and Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama's media company.
Every week, hear guests like Michelle Obama, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, Matthew Broderick, D-Nice, José Andrés, and more explore the complexities of family life and how their earliest culinary experiences helped shape their personal and professional lives—and of course, each guest brings a recipe for a favorite dish from their youth so you can taste a bit of their story.
With a delicious buffet of actors, authors, chefs, musicians, and more, the rich conversations that flow from that initial, simple prompt reveal the histories, memories, and cultures that emerge from the kitchen, the heart of the home where we are nourished physically and spiritually.
Some of our most valuable and vulnerable moments happened there as we watched parents struggle with bills, wrestle with shifting family dynamics, or figure out new roles for themselves as feminism changed the national terrain. Your Mama’s Kitchen is a podcast about cuisine and culture, ingredients and identities, and the meals and memories that make us who we are.
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What they’re saying
THE TODAY SHOW
“Michele Norris talks deeply personal podcast 'Your Mama's Kitchen”
Press hereWASHINGTON POST LIVE
“Michele Norris is a Washington Post columnist and former NPR host whose new podcast explores how cooking and conversation come together in “Your Mama’s Kitchen.” Norris joins The Post’s Jonathan Capehart to discuss her new series, how childhood food memories shape us and what she learned from talking to former first lady Michelle Obama. ”
Press hereCBS MORNING
“Award-winning journalist Michele Norris joins "CBS Mornings" to discuss her new podcast, "Your Mama's Kitchen: Conversations from the Heart of the Home." The weekly series explores cuisine and culture and how our earliest kitchen memories make us who we are.”
press hereMSNBC MORNING JOE
“Host Michele Norris joins Morning Joe to discuss her new Audible podcast 'Your Mama's Kitchen: Conversations from the Heart of the Home.'
press here
All About the Host, Michele Norris
Michele Norris is one of the most trusted voices in journalism. As the host of the Audible Original podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen, she brings her warm yet rigorous interviewing skills to conversations that are rich and revealing. Norris is also a columnist for The Washington Post Opinions section, and her voice will be familiar to followers of public radio, where from 2002 to 2012 she was a host of National Public Radio’s afternoon magazine show All Things Considered. Norris is also the founding director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody Award-winning narrative archive where people around the world share their experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity—in just six words—as the starting point for conversations about race and belonging. Norris is also a National Geographic Storytelling Fellow.
She is the author of The Grace of Silence, and her next book, Our Hidden Conversations, will be published in January 2024 and explores race and identity in America during the period bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She has received Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont Awards for her work. In 2022, she received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.
Norris was named "Journalist of the Year" in 2009 by the National Association of Black Journalists. Before joining NPR in 2002, Michele spent almost ten years as a TV correspondent for ABC News in the Washington Bureau covering politics, policy, and the dynamics of social change. She has also worked as a staff writer for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
Norris was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University and has served as a Sine Fellow at American University. In 2022, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is a judge for The Chancellor Awards and a board member for the Peabody Awards. She is also a board member of the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia University and the storytelling committee for the Obama Presidential Center under construction on the South Side of Chicago. Additionally, she serves on the board of the National Archives Foundation.
You can also find Michele…here
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Norris is also the founding director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody Award-winning narrative archive where people around the world share their experiences, questions,hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity—in just six words—as the startingpoint for conversations about race and belonging. Norris is also a National GeographicStorytelling Fellow.
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Peabody Award–winning journalist Michele Norris offers a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through her decade-long work at The Race Card Project.
The prompt seemed simple: Race. Your Thoughts. Six Words. Please Send.
The answers, though, have been challenging and complicated. In the twelve years since award-winning journalist Michele Norris first posed that question, over half a million people have submitted their stories to The Race Card Project inbox. The stories are shocking in their depth and candor, spanning the full spectrum of race, ethnicity, identity, and class. Even at just six words, the micro-essays can pack quite a punch, revealing, fear, pain, triumph, and sometimes humor. Responses such as: You’re Pretty for a Black girl. White privilege, enjoy it, earned it. Lady, I don’t want your purse. My ancestors massacred Indians near here. Urban living has made me racist. I’m only Asian when it’s convenient.
Many go even further than just six words, submitting backstories, photos, and heirlooms: a collection much like a scrapbook of American candor you rarely get to see. Our Hidden Conversations is a unique compilation of stories, richly reported essays, and photographs providing a window into America during a tumultuous era. This powerful book offers an honest, if sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about race and identity, permitting us to eavesdrop on deep-seated thoughts, private discussions, and long submerged memories.
The breadth of this work came as a surprise to Norris. For most of the twelve years she has collected these stories, many were submitted by white respondents. This unexpected panorama provides a rare 360-degree view of how Americans see themselves and one another.
Our Hidden Conversations reminds us that even during times of great division, honesty, grace, and a willing ear can provide a bridge toward empathy and maybe even understanding.
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In the wake of talk of a “post-racial America” upon the ascendance of Barack Obama as president of the United States, Michele Norris set out through original reporting, to write a book about “the hidden conversation on race” that is going on in this country. But along the way she unearthed painful family secrets - from her father’s shooting by the Birmingham police within weeks of his discharge from service in World War II to her grandmother’s peddling pancake mix as an itinerant Aunt Jemima.
In what became an intensely personal and bracing journey, Norris traveled from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South to explore “things left unsaid” by her family when she was growing up. Along the way she discovers how character is forged by both repression and revelation. She learns how silence became a form of self-protection and a means of survival for her parents - strivers determined to create a better life for their children at a time when America was beginning to experiment with racial equality - as it was for white Americans who grew up enforcing strict segregation (sometimes through violence) but who now live in a world where integration is the norm.
Extraordinary for Norris’s candor in examining her own complex racial legacy, The Grace of Silence is also informed by hundreds of interviews with ordinary Americans and wise observations about evolving attitudes toward race in America. It is concerned with assessing the truth of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertion that, vis-à-vis race, ours is a nation of cowards, for often what is left unsaid is more important than what is openly discussed.
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Michele L. Norris is a columnist and consultant for Post Opinions and founding director of The Race Card Project. She worked as a reporter at the Post from 1988 to 1993, covering education, politics, the AIDS crisis and the impact of the region’s drug trade.
