This episode is also available as a blog post: https://literaryeyes.wordpress.com/2020/12/29/sanctuary/

I am reading from the beginning of Chapter Two of Into The Fire: A Poet's Journey through Hell's Kitchen, a memoir of my journey from the arts to community activist in the late 1970s and 1980s. Hell's Kitchen is a West Side neighborhood in Manhattan which has a long and rich history of family, faith, and hard-working people, but also gangs and violence.