Listen…

Join host Diane Edgecomb and modern-day Shahrazads Norah Dooley, Leeny Del Seamonds, and Mike Cohen for a Storytelling Symposium on December 6th following the matinee performance of Arabian Nights!

Norah Dooley is a storyteller, educator, critically acclaimed children’s author and creator of StoriesLive®, a high school storytelling curriculum and story slam program. She was the co-founder of massmouth.com and the Greater Boston Story Slam series. As project director of StoriesLive® she created and implements a curriculum used to teach over 7,000 Greater Boston high school students to tell compelling first-person narratives. As an adjunct faculty, she teaches storytelling to undergraduates at Tufts and graduates at Lesley University.  In January 2014, she returned to lecture on storytelling and language acquisition in Tokyo, Japan as part of a multi-year grant funded by the Japanese government. Norah was invited as a featured performer at the Exchange Place of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough,TN in 2013.

Leeny Del Seamonds, Master Story Performer, is a multi award-winning, internationally acclaimed performer of Hispanic/Latino, original and World stories spiced with exquisite mime, a cornucopia of characters, and love of people. With a twinkle in her eye and fire in her heart, Leeny breathes life into stories as she masterfully and effortlessly springs from one story character to another. A dedicated Teaching Artist, Leeny encourages listeners to feel positive about themselves and rejoice in human and cultural diversity, inviting them to share in her Latin/Cuban-American sense of humor and love of performing. Her most recent achievement in growing as a performer is becoming a certified Professional Voice Actor.

Mike Cohen took up storytelling in 1992, after surviving acting, play writing, stand-up comedy, poetry slams, and cancer. He has been entertaining adults and children all over New England with his inventive and dazzling stories ever since. Mike has appeared at Coffeehouses, Festivals, Schools, Camps, Homeless Shelters, and even a Prison. He has a Master’s Degree in Education from Boston College, was on the Board of Directors of L.A.N.E.S. (League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling), helps to run The Story Space (the World’s longest-running, and only weekly Storytelling venue); and has bicycled from Seattle to Boston, by himself, three times.

An award-winning storyteller, author and theatre artist, Diane Edgecomb‘s unique adaptations of traditional tales and original stories have been featured on NPR and at storytelling festivals, coffeehouses, and theatres throughout the country. Her storytelling style, where she fully embodies the various characters and scenes in a tale, bringing each moment alive, has won her the first national ORACLE AWARD for Storytelling Excellence in the Northeast. She will be featured at Central Square Theater later this season as part of That’s What She Said: A Feminine Perspective, where Diane will bring her performance, “One Thousand Doorways,” about her journeys in the mountains of Turkish Kurdistan, on Monday, March 14, 2016 at 8 pm. LIVINGMYTH.COM