Next KIND STORIES IN CONCERT
Sunday, May 4, 2025
7:00-8:30 pm Eastern Time
Exploring kindness in its many faces and forms, through folk tales and personal stories, we dive deeply into multiple experiences of kindness.
Kind Stories in Concert
Sunday, May 4, 2025
7:00 pm-8:30 pm EDT
Register here to Receive a FREE Kind Stories in Concert Zoom Link
Click here to Donate and help make programs like this possible
https://square.link/u/d9xbGN2I
“Kindness is having the ability to speak with love, listen with patience, and act with compassion.”
-Random Acts of Kindness Foundation
Join the Healing Story Alliance for a special gathering to share and explore stories of kindness in its many faces and forms. Through folk tales and personal stories, we will dive deeply into multiple experiences of kindness. What is it? How does it impact us and our relationships to ourselves, to each other, to the world? Come and listen to “kind stories” shared by both professional tellers and community members and see what memories of kindness emerge for you.
Date: May 4, 2025
Time: 7:00pm-8:30pm EDT (Open Mic Story Share and Reflection: last half hour)
Format: The story session opens with a concert of seasoned tellers and community tellers sharing stories with themes of kindness. During the second half of the gathering, audience members are invited to share a story, moment, or reflection about kindness that emerged for them as listeners.
Purpose: We all need a little more kindness in our lives. Perhaps a story can take us there.
“WHEN YOU ARE KIND TO OTHERS, IT NOT ONLY CHANGES YOU, IT CHANGES THE WORLD.” -Harold Kushner
ABOUT the STORYTELLERS
KIND STORIES in CONCERT
ABOUT the STORYTELLERS
Featured Tellers
Sufian Zhemukhov is an award-winning author and performer. His solo shows have been featured in the 2023 Teller in Residence season, off-Broadway, and nationwide. NPR presented his show Flirting Like an American is a show about romance, culture, and one immigrant’s story. An international affairs scholar by day, Sufian draws from his personal experience as a first-generation immigrant and political analyst, which might be funnier than it sounds. His storytelling endeavors received the 2020 JJ Reneaux Emerging Artist Award from the National Storytelling Network, and his academic research won the 2019 Best Book Award from the International Studies Association.
Cheryl Hamilton is devoted to advancing inclusive communities and storytelling. After twenty years in the nonprofit sector serving immigrants and refugees, she founded Stellar Story Company. The woman-owned business helps people and institutions deliver extraordinary stories and unforgettable events for meaningful change. She is also the creator of the Suitcase Stories® series and former director of curation and coaching for the award-winning national media program Stories from the Stage. Hamilton has coached over 1,500 storytellers from 85 countries.
Jasmin Cardenas is a Colombian-American award-winning bilingual storyteller, Theater maker, Actress, Educator and Social Activist. Jasmin Cardenas is a theater maker who uses teatro and play to create spaces where people can connect, tell their story and spark change. A proud daughter of Colombian immigrants, Jasmin was inspired by El Teatro Campesino when she began using Theater of the Oppressed to devise original scenes with working people in the fight for workers’ rights. Learning T.O. with Augusto Boal dramatically altered the course of Jasmin’s life and she will be forever grateful. Together with Chicago’s working people she co-founded WorkersTEATRO in Chicago, IL to amplify wage worker stories by engaging the public. Recognized for her arts & civic engagement work she was awarded a 2020-2022 international LAB Fellowship by The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. She most enjoys discovering new places, ideally by bicycle.
Emcee
Denise Manning Keyes Page began storytelling when a dear friend in her last months of living with ALS urged her to do so. Denise excavated a story she had written about her mother’s family, edited it so that it was an appropriate oral story and shared it at a community story event. She did so to honor two people she loved. Her mother and her friend. Her mother was deceased at the time, but her friend delighted in the feedback she heard. Ms. Page is convinced this entry into the art of storytelling ignited a passion within her because it began in so much love. She had no intention of telling again. But she has. That was 2019. She tells stories to heal, challenge, inspire, inform and connect.
Community Tellers
Nazia Jamal is a resident of Boston who has recently fallen in love with storytelling. Nazia resettled to the United States in January 2024 after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, where she worked as a teacher, inspiring young women to pursue education. Today, Nazia teaches full-time in a language school and speaks as often as possible with her students and family back in Afghanistan.
Healing Story Alliance is a not-for-profit, educational, arts organization which provides online resources and concert, workshop, and community programming
in support of storytelling as a healing art. Please donate to help make programs like these possible.
To listen to past Kind Stories, visit our archive of recordings.