Brooklyn Reading Works will present on Feb. 13 The Authored Voice: Storytelling Across Lives and Media, an evening of stories and conversation with Murray Nossel, Catherine Burns, Trisha Coburn, and Edgar Oliver, moderated by John Guidry. These award-winning panelists will talk about the various media they have used to tell stories-performance, film, books, videos-and the different ways they cultivate voice for themselves and others. The discussion will explore how storytelling is cathartic, empowering, entertaining … and sometimes a pretty good business.
The event will take place at the Old Stone House in Park Slope at 8 p.m. A $5 donation at the door is appreciated.
MURRAY NOSSEL is co-founder of Narativwith Paul Browde, a company that has developed a storytelling methodology based on Murray and Paul’s stage performance, Two Men Talking.The performance began as an improvised telling of the story of their friendship, from their school days in South Africa to New York in the 1990s and the present. Storytelling was central to Murray’s practice as a clinician in AIDS services during the height of the epidemic, and he is also an award-winning filmmaker whose work includes “Why Can’t We Be a Family Again?”, “A Brooklyn Family Tale”,”Paternal Instinct”, and “Turn to Me”, featuring Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel. Murray holds a doctorate in Social Work from Columbia University and teaches in Columbia’s Master of Science in Narrative Medicine program.
TRISHA COBURN has worked for a number of years as a fine artist in Boston and New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, and she is also an interior designer with De La Torre Design. Trisha’s storytelling began with a one-day workshop at Narativ and eventually led her toThe Moth, presenting her story, “Miss Macy,” on tour and on The Moth Radio Hour. Trisha is currently working on a collection of short stories based on her childhood experiences growing up in Alabama.
CATHERINE BURNS is The Moth’s long time Artistic Director and a frequent host of the Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour. She is the editor of the New York Times Best Seller “The Moth: 50 True Stories.” Prior to The Moth, she directed and produced independent films and television, interviewing such diverse talent as Ozzy Osbourne, Martha Stewart and Howard Stern. She is the director of the solo show “Helen & Edgar”, which opened at The Public Theater in January with the Under the Radar Festival, where it was named a pick of the festival by The New Yorker, Time Out and WNYC.
EDGAR OLIVER is a novelist, poet, and playwright who has been lauded as “a living work of theater all by himself” by Ben Brantley of The New York Times. He is a member of the Axis Theatre Company, under the direction of Randy Sharp. His one-man show “East 10th Street: Self-Portrait with Empty House” was the recipient of a Fringe First Award at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His most recent show, “Helen & Edgar”, directed by the Moth’s Artistic Director Catherine Burns and produced by Moth Founder George Dawes Green, did a sold-out run at The Public Theater with the Under the Radar Festival. He has published three collections of his poems—”A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There”, “Summer”, and “The Brooklyn Public Library” —and a novel, “The Man Who Loved Plants.”