Alison Stewart loves her job, which is not surprising. As host of the live afternoon radio show All of It With Alison Stewart on WNYC, she interviews actors, musicians, authors, artists, chefs, comedians and other creatives and changemakers every weekday from noon to 2 pm. She includes thousands of tristate radio listeners in the conversation during the call-in portion of the show. Once a month, she hosts Get Lit With All of It at the New York Public Library in front of a live audience of as many as 400 people, and many more listening online. They hear Stewart interview an author about a recent book. At the end, a musician plays a song (recent guests have included Suzanne Vega, Rosanne Cash and Laurie Anderson).Stewart is well suited to the roles of radio host and culture maven. She grew up in Glen Ridge and attended Brown University, where she spent “every hour at the radio station when I wasn’t studying.” A job as a producer/reporter at MTV followed, where she won a Peabody Award for her coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. Over the next several decades, she anchored news programs on NPR, PBS, ABC and MSNBC. She’s a contributor to AtlanticLIVE and PBS News-Hour and the author of two books, most recently Junk: Digging Through America’s Love Affair With Stuff.But her path hasn’t been without its bumps. In February 2024, she was in the WNYC studios in SoHo rehearsing her show introduction when her speech suddenly became garbled. She called her doctor, who told her to go straight to the emergency room. There, a CT scan showed a mass on her brain. Frighteningly, for a woman who makes her living with her voice, it was in the left hemisphere, in what’s known as Broca’s area, the speech center.Stewart underwent brain surgery. In a novel procedure, she remained awake so the neurosurgeon, Dr. Randy D’Amico, could test her speech while probing her brain. For three hours, Stewart answered his questions while he carefully removed some whitish-yellow material, which fortunately turned out to be an infection, not cancer.“I was really lucky to find this surgeon,” she says. “He used this really amazing technology, and knew my speech was really important and that the infections were right on my speech center. And he figured a way to go in and disrupt as little as possible.”Immediately following the surgery, Stewart couldn’t talk at all, which terrified her, even though that was expected while her brain healed. She spent weeks in rehab before she could speak in sentences. She started wondering about alternative careers.“It was a long time to be without speech,” she says.It wasn’t until seven months later that Stewart felt she could consistently put full sentences together and was ready to return to All of It full-time.Returning to the show was exhausting. “It was: work, go home and sleep; work, go home and sleep,” she says. “It was really hard.”More than a year later, it’s still challenging. “I have to focus really, really intensely when I’m on the air,” she says. “There are certain things I still can’t do and some things that take a long time for me to do. On air, I’m learning to keep going when I make a mistake.”Growing up in Glen Ridge, on a street partly in Montclair, gave her a strong foundation. “A lot of Black families lived on our street; they were all trying to make it. There were about six kids; we all looked like each other. We played together in the street and went from house to house. I didn’t realize until high school that you could make friends in school and bring them home,” she says with a laugh.One of her pals was Jim Johnson, who became an assistant U.S. Attorney for New York’s Southern District and held high-level positions in the Treasury Department.Stewart’s mother taught biology at Columbia High School in Maplewood; her father was an executive at Squibb, the pharmaceutical company. “My dad, who was from Harlem, used to bring me into the city to see the Harlem Globetrotters, Broadway, the Museum of Natural History,” she says. “I had the culture and stimulation of New York and the sweet, suburban Mayberry R.F.D. It was the best of both worlds.”The post WYNC’s Alison Stewart Is Bouncing Back After Brain Surgery appeared first on New Jersey Monthly.