Featured Storytellers:

 Alyssa Bigay comes from a long line of loud Italian storytellers who never let the truth ruin a good tale. She’s been writing since childhood, first on a manual typewriter in her attic, now mostly in her head, where an inner monologue won’t stop drafting and revising the world around her. Her daily audience of 7th graders find her stories strange, surprising, and sometimes amusing, and she hopes her pre-teen wit translates into something equally entertaining for adults.

Bill Maxfield is Concord Art’s resident installation expert and volunteer extraordinaire.

Mark Modrall is a computer programmer from Littleton. He started telling stories in public in 2012 when he ran out of relatives who hadn’t heard that one before. Hopefully he’s gotten better at it since then. He’s won several story slams at the Moth, Massmouth, and a few other places and has twice been a featured teller at GBH’s “Stories From the Stage.”

Candace Nelson is a retired development aid worker, a career that took her to Latin America and Africa dozens of times over thirty-four years. In retirement, she has become a student of storytelling. She appeared on Stories from the Stage in 2022 and is inspired to transform her own moments, small and large, into stories. Candace and her husband raised their two sons in Concord, but now she splits her time between Concord and her lake cabin in Poland Maine.

Don Picard is a Moth storyteller who shares his own moving life moments with humor and humility. He has worked in software development for more than thirty years and is currently employed at Cogito Corporation, which can “augment your workforce with our AI coaching system.” Don was a double major in Theatre Arts and Computer Science at Cornell and chose to work as an engineer in order to be able to live in Cambridge and feed his family. Don enjoys telling live stories about his kids, husband, and extended family as it is fun, therapeutic, and allows him to exercise the other half of his college degree so he doesn’t become bitter.

Robin Schoenthaler has been a storyteller for about a decade and has been with Fugitive since 2018. In 2019 she won a Moth Grand Slam Championship, and she is never going to stop talking about it—ever. She is also an award-winning essayist—mostly about love, loss, life, death, and Covid. Robin’s day job for twenty-eight years was as a cancer doctor with MGH at Emerson Hospital in their Department of Radiation Oncology. She now helps people with second opinions about their cancers while she travels the world.

Hannah Stevenson is a firstborn of 3 daughters, mother to 3 teen daughters, married to 1 husband, and supervised by 1 loyal yet naughty sheepdog. She’s an artist, environmentalist, and women’s reproductive and menopause health advocate. Inspired by: travel, humor, the generosity of the human spirit, and the finding of common ground.

 Alexandra “Sasha” Weigel is a Concord resident, a mom of three (one fur baby), and full time Midwife at Concord OB/GYN. When she’s not delivering babies at Emerson Hospital, she’s likely making art or fairy houses with her kids, or marveling at the beauty of the natural world.