CNN was just a glimmer in my eye when I was growing up in Atlanta.

When either major stories break or something just really touches me, I initiate and pitch, then follow through. I will literally march across the newsroom and bang on the president of CNN's door. He knows when I'm coming.

I tend to gravitate toward gender- and race-related stories.

I want to help lift women's voices. And I realize, in doing that, I need to use my own.

I'm grateful that I have a theater career because television isn't kind to you when you're over forty.

You should never have regrets in life. All the steps that I have taken in my career have served for something, and I have learned from them.

We wanted the humor to come from the characters and their world - you go down there to escape the world up here for a while. So when the crew would write jokes that would refer to American TV or culture, I'd just eliminate them because it just seemed odd that SpongeBob would know about it.

When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn't in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back... and I'm hanging out with the Rolling Stones.