Storytellers for How to Build a Fire: Where are you going? Where have you been?

How to Build a Fire: Where are you going? Where have you been? | Storytellers | Facebook Event | Livestream

STORYTELLERS:

SIMI TOLEDANO:
Simi Toledano is a Brooklyn-based performance artist, actress, writer, activist, mystic, poet, tree-hugger, traveler, friend, and lover. Most recently she was seen performing in Alice Gerstenberg’s one-act play “He Said, She Said” as part of St. Jean’s Players one-act play festival and Yani Perez’s one-act “The Engagement Party” as part of the first annual Leela NYC Theater Festival, which celebrates non-traditional casting. She is also a regular performance artist- storyteller at Big Irv’s variety show. Gratitude to God/dess and all who believe in her.

H’RINA DETROY:
H’Rina DeTroy is an Avodah K. Offit Scholar and Hertog Fellow at the Hunter MFA Creative Writing program, specializing in memoir. Her work has appeared in the Okayafrica.com, Huffington Post, Diacritics, Cultural Survival Quarterly, and Glimpse Magazine. She works as a Writing Specialist at the Harlem Children’s Zone. She also studies flamenco and often daydreams in polyrhythms.

AHMED ALI AKBAR:
Ahmed Ali Akbar is a staff writer for BuzzFeed and blogger at Rad Brown Dads. His personal writing focuses on immigrants, nostalgia, and self-love. His writing has been published in the essay collection “Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy,” The Aerogram, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter and Tumblr @radbrowndads.

GREG DEVANEY:
Greg Devaney grew up just outside New York City and has been living in Brooklyn for six years. A lapsed-musician and unpublished writer, he remains inspired by the energy of the city, removing himself from it’s craziness and learning about the motives of all sort of people from their many varied backgrounds. He remains tangentially involved in the arts working for a fine art shipping and installation company.

HOSTS:

KATE HILL CANTRILL:
Kate Hill Cantrill is the author of the short story collection, Walk Back From Monkey School, published from Press 53. She has been awarded fellowships from the Michener Center For Writers, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Jentel Artists Residency. For more than three years she curated the Rabbit Tales Reading and Performance Series in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and prior to that the Utter Reading Series in Austin, Texas.

DENNIS NORRIS:
Dennis Norris II holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He’s won several awards and fellowships for his short fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, The NYS Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center, and was recently named a 2015 Kimbilio Fellow. His short stories either appear, or are forthcoming in Bound Off, and Madcap Review. He is a curriculum coordinator for the Harlem Children’s Zone and a Basic Skills Instructor for Figure Skating in Harlem. He firmly believes that gossip is a writers’ unalienable right, that mimosas should not be limited to brunch, and that the two are not mutually exclusive.