Celebrate Live Storytelling with Tellabration!

On Saturday, November 23, from 7:30-8:30pm, the Storyteller’s Cottage will host Tellabration: Live Storytelling with Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti as Zora Neale Hurston. Tickets are $20 and can be reserved here: https://www.storytellerscottage.com/book-online/tellabration-live-storytelling

Tellabration is a worldwide storytelling celebration made up of dozens of storytelling events held all over the world, throughout the month of November. Its purpose is to introduce adults, as well as children, to the pleasures of the oral art of storytelling.

Tellabration is spearheaded in Connecticut by the Connecticut Storytelling Center, based in Connecticut College in Lew London, CT. It features professional storytellers at locations throughout the state, including libraries, schools, retirement communities, churches, and even private homes.

The Storyteller’s Cottage is pleased to feature storyteller Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti. She is a living history artist who portrays historical women in her shows and introduces untapped history, drawing on a wide array of primary historical resources. For the past 20 years, Quezaire-Presutti has engaged audiences with performances giving voice to real life accounts, struggles, self-determination, and triumphs of the women she portrays. Each performance is infused with her unique fingerprint, giving an integral portrait of a historical event or person.

Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti will portray Zora Neale Hurston, a woman of enormous talent who rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. She was an outstanding novelist, journalist, folklorist, and anthropologist. Hurston believed in the beauty of black expressions and traditions. Although her work was praised by some, many attacked it, focusing on Hurtson’s lifestyle and personality -- her audaciousness, independence, and arrogance.

After going to Florida in 1927 to collect folklore, and spending years organizing her notes, she published “Mules and Men” in 1935. Hurston celebrated the African American culture of the rural south because she believed that black people had wonderful stories that the world needed to hear, and she told them proudly. Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti, as Zora Neale Hurston, will talk about her life and tell some of the folk tales she collected.

The Storyteller’s Cottage is located in a vintage Victorian house in the center of historic Simsbury, CT, and hosts all manner of immersive literary events throughout the year, including Agatha Christie inspired live murder mystery parties, Great Gatsby themed Jazz Supper Clubs, fascinating close-up illusions at Fine Parlor Magic nights, a Literary Dinner Party series on select evenings at midnight, and more.

The Storyteller's Cottage is located at 750 Hopmeadow Street in Simsbury. Parking for The Storyteller's Cottage is free, and is available on the street in front of the building, and in the Fiddler's Green parking lot on Wilcox Street (behind the house). For more information, please call 860-877-6099 or visit www.StorytellersCottage.com.