Upcoming and past live shows
One week until our upcoming Lambda Literary team-up show that we are proud to say is also an official Brooklyn Book Festival Event!
First, meet our fourth and final storyteller Charlotte Marchant.
Charlotte Marchant started writing, 
100lettersfrommyfather.
Click here to RSVP via Facebook!
Lambda Literary introduced us to our next storyteller.
We are excited to share the love and have you meet Nicole Shawan Junior! Click here to RSVP to our upcoming “Coming & Going” show.
Nicole Shawan Junior (Smith College BA | Pace University MST | Temple University JD) was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. She is a black, queer and poverty-born counter-storyteller. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Lambda Literary’s anthology Emerge, Roxane Gay’s Medium platform Gay Mag, ZORA, The Feminist Wire, SLICE, Color Bloq, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, Inkwell Black, Sinister Wisdom, and more. A 2021 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence, Nicole has received fellowships from New York Foundation of the Arts, Esalen, Show Us Your Spines RADAR Productions, and more. She’s an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Summer Workshop, the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Writers Week, the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and VONA. Nicole is also the founder of Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc.: A Literary Arts Revolution and the Senior Nonfiction Editor at Raising Mothers: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about Nicole at www.NicoleShawanJunior.com. Follow her on Instagram @NicoleShawanJunior and on Twitter @NicoleShawan
How excited are we for our first story meeting tomorrow night! The storytellers are going to virtual meet each other for the first time and work together to develop their true-life tales on the page.
But, FIRST, meet our next storyteller Calvin S. Cato.
Calvin S. Cato has performed all across the United States and has even crossed the border into Canada. His television appearances include the Game Show Network, Oxygen’s My Crazy Love, National Geographic’s Brain Games, and an unaired pilot for Vice Media called Emergency Black Meeting. His comedy has been featured in numerous festivals including San Francisco Sketchfest, Austin’s Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, Brooklyn Pride, and the Women in Comedy Festival. In addition, you may have heard him overshare on many podcasts including Keith and The Girl, Guys We F*cked, RISK!, and Tinder Tales. In 2017, Calvin was named one of Time Out New York’s Queer Comics of Color to Watch Out For.
Our first story meeting for “Coming & Going” is this week! Excited for these four dynamic storytellers to meet each other and workshop their true-life tales. Meet our first storyteller, Nancy Agabian!
Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher, and literary organizer, working in the spaces between race, ethnicity, cultural identity, feminism and queer identity. Her recent novel “The Fear of Large and Small Nations” was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. She is the author of Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (Aunt Lute Books, 2008), a memoir that was honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books, 2000), a collection of poetry and performance texts. Her personal essays that explore liminal spaces of identity have been published in The Margins, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Kweli Journal and the award-winning anthology, Fierce: Essays by and about Dauntless Women (Nauset Press, 2018). She teaches creative writing at universities and art centers, most recently at NYU, The New School, and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in SoHo. With writers Meera Nair and Amy Paul she has connected neighbors, writers, and activists in Queens, NY, with the reading series Queens Writers Resist. She is currently a caregiver to her elderly parents in East Walpole, Massachusetts, in the house where she grew up.
Our “Coming & Going” show is coming up fast! For this special Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event, we’re teaming up once again with Lambda Literary for a special night of virtual queer storytelling with a twist.
Click here to RSVP via Facebook.
Top Left: Calvin S. Cato; Top Right: Nancy Agabian; BL: Charlotte Marchant; BR: Nicole Shawan Junior
We’ll be working with our storytellers over the next couple of weeks to develop their true-life tales inspired by the theme “Coming & Going” on the page. Join us via Zoom where they will trade tales and present each other’s stories on the virtual stage. Plus, a chance to win some literary fun from our friends at The Astoria Bookshop!
Storytellers:
Nancy Agabian (Queens Writers Resist)
Calvin S. Cato (RISK!, Laugh It Up, Astoria!)
Nicole Shawan Junior (Lambda Literary Fellow)
Charlotte Marchant (Lambda Literary Fellow)
$10 suggested donation to benefit the Woodside/Sunnyside Community COVID-19 Food Relief Group
Click here to donate directly. When donating use the dropdown to indicate Covid 19 Sunnyside/Woodside Food Distribution (or Venmo @KellyJean-Fitzsimmons who will collect and donate).
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2020 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL EVENT
No, YOU Tell It! “Coming & Going” is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Our first VIRTUAL SHOW is also a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event!
We are thrilled to team up with Lambda Literary once again for this special night of queer storytelling with a twist.
Four curated storytellers will work together to develop their nonfiction stories inspired by the theme “Coming & Going” on the page. Watch as they trade tales and present each other’s stories on the “Zoom” stage.
Plus, a chance to win fun literary prizes from The Astoria Bookshop!
Storytellers Nancy Agabian, Calvin Cato, Nicole Shawan Junior, and Charlotte Marchant.
More info on the storytellers and how to save your virtual seat coming soon…
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2020 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL EVENT
No, YOU Tell It! “Coming & Going” is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Sad we had to postpone (new date TBD) today’s scheduled No, YOU Tell It! show because we have loved working with these powerhouse women.
It’s been an honor watching them bond together as a group over the past month while helping each other develop and experience an intensely intimate set of stories.
I’m happy to report that all of our storytellers are healthy, but we want to do our part to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. I’m grateful to Sunnyside Plays for their support in this decision and offer to reschedule the show (new date TBD) for when the time is right.
These stories will be told! While we wait, please take the time to listen to some of the amazing story swaps from our live shows on the No, YOU Tell It! podcast.
Want to help out our series in this tenuous time? Click here to donate via our fiscal sponsor The Field. Or share our podcast with a friend! Available on iTunes, AudioBoom, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.
Brush up rehearsals begin this week for our “Precious” show!
The storytellers have traded their true-life tale and will each be working with a NYTI director to step into their partner’s shoes and give their story some theatrical oomph on the virtual stage. Let’s meet our next storyteller, Sokunthary Svay!
Sokunthary Svay was born in a refugee camp in Thailand shortly after her parents fled Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. They were sponsored to come to the United States and resettled in the Bronx where she grew up. She is a performer, collaborator, and writer. She was also a founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), the recipient of the American Opera Projects’ Composer and the Voice Fellowship for 2017-19, and the 2018 Emerging Poets Fellowship at Poets House. Currently, she is poetry editor for Newtown Literary, a doctoral student in English at the The Graduate Center, CUNY and teaches college writing at Queens College. Svay’s first opera, “Woman of Letters” (in collaboration with composer, Liliya Ugay) received its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in January 2020 as part of the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiatives. Her poetry collection, Apsara in New York (2017) is available from Willow Books.
More at: www.sokunthary.com / Twitter: @SokSrai
Meet our next No, YOU Tell It! “Precious” storyteller Heather Quinlan!
Audience members will have a chance to answer trivia questions and win storyteller Heather Quinlan’s new book, Plagues, Pandemics and Viruses: From the Plague of Athens to Covid-19. Can’t wait? 
Click here to order the book now from our friends at The Astoria Bookshop!
Heather Quinlan is a documentary producer and director whose first short film, “O Brooklyn! My Brooklyn!” was called “Charming … an endearing way of making an old poem more relevant” by The New York Times, and her feature-length documentary on the New York accent, “If These Knishes Could Talk,” has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, WSJ, NPR, and the BBC. It recently screened at the Library of Congress.
Heather is currently writing a book about the history of plagues and pandemics tentatively titled, “You’re Gonna Die”; she’s also writing a screenplay about her stepmother called “DIE BITCH DIE”; and is planning her fall wedding to writer Adam McGovern.
Update! Since the postponement of our “Precious” show, Heather and Adam were married in May via ZOOM. Click here to read about their virtual wedding.
Proud to share that No, YOU Tell It! is a recipient of a 2020 Queens Arts Fund Arts Access Grant. Our first show of 2020 No, YOU Tell It! “Precious” is coming up soon.
Join us on March 12th at Sunnyside Plays at 7 pm. For this special Queens edition, four storytellers have come together to develop their own stories inspired by the theme “Precious” on the page. They will then trade tales to present each other’s story on stage.
top left: Sokunthary Svay, top right: Gail Thomas, bottom left: Heather Quinlan, bottom right: Nita Noveno
Storytellers include:
Nita Noveno (co-host, Sunday Salon)
Heather Quinlan (documentary producer and director, If These Knishes Could Talk)
Sokunthary Svay (poetry editor, Newtown Literary)
Gail Thomas (storytelling instructor, The Story Studio, Legal Outreach)
One drink minimum (beer, wine, and non-alcoholic beverages available)
$10 suggested donation
No, YOU Tell It! “Precious” is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
