This May, join us for our first show in St. Louis as part of the St. Louis Storytelling Festival! At this event, we'll present five true, personal stories around the theme of "Eclipse," as we anticipate the upcoming total solar eclipse passing through Missouri on August 21, 2017. Full lineup to be announced soon.
This event is produced in partnership with the St. Louis Storytelling Festival. To find out more about the festival and view the full schedule, see www.stlstorytellingfestival.com.
Stories by:
Rebecca Boyle is a freelance science journalist in Saint Louis. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and her work regularly appears in New Scientist, FiveThirtyEight, Popular Science and many other publications for adults and kids. Her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science & Nature Writing and she is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. Rebecca started her career as a political reporter, but has been obsessed with science since watching NOVA and the original Cosmos series as a kid. Rebecca mostly focuses on astronomy, physics, and climate change, and occasionally writes about neuroscience, the history of science, and U.S. monetary policy. She has a history degree from Colorado State University and a certificate of attendance from Space Camp. Rebecca grew up in Denver and dreams of the pristine night skies over the Rocky Mountains.
Eli Chen is the science and environment reporter at St. Louis Public Radio. She also covered the same beat for Delaware Public Media, where she reported on threats to bats, coastal erosion and other things of concern to a small east coast state. Before that, she corralled robots and citizen scientists for the World Science Festival in New York City and spent a brief stint booking guests for Science Friday’s live events in 2013. Eli grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, where a mixture of teen angst, a love for Ray Bradbury novels and the growing awareness about climate change propelled her to become the science storyteller she is today. She has a bachelor’s in environmental sustainability and creative writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has a master’s degree in journalism, with a focus on science reporting, from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
Ken Haller is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. He is President of the Missouri Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and serves on the boards of the Missouri Foundation for Health and the Gateway Media Literacy Project. He has also served as President of the St. Louis Pediatric Society; PROMO, Missouri’s statewide LGBT civil rights organization’ and GLMA, the national organization of LGBT health care professionals. He is a frequent spokesperson in local and national media on the health care needs of children and adolescents. Ken is also an accomplished actor, produced playwright, and acclaimed cabaret performer. In 2015 he was named Best St. Louis Cabaret Performer by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and he has taken his one-person shows to New York, Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco. His special interests include cultural competency, health literacy, the relationship of medicine to the arts, the effects of media on children, and the special health needs of LGBT youth. His personal mission is Healing.
Named after the iconic Angela Davis, Angela Speck likes bright colors, is a nerd at heart, and has wanted to be an astronaut since she was 5 years old. Originally from Yorkshire (England) she went to college in London where she was able to pursue her childhood dreams by majoring in astrophysics. After a brief stint as a r&d technician in a Lancashire company run by crazy new-age hippies, she returned to London and completed a PhD in astronomy. Now the Director of Astronomy at MU, she continues to research and teach astrophysics and to share her passion for all things extra-terrestrial. While she loves living in Columbia, sometimes she still gets cravings for good curry and unadulterated Wensleydale cheese.
Amanda Yates is a designer, visual storyteller and self-proclaimed space geek at PGAV Destinations. In 2012, she co-founded Brain Drain Collective to put together a proposal for GOOD Magazine's Ideas For Cities. The proposal, a physical and digital network called CityPulse, received a grant for continued development and later spun off into an independent company, CTY. Amanda’s latest side project is Second Tuesdays, a monthly storytelling event now in its 4thyear. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, she is passionate about design education and volunteers with their tuition-free community architecture studio, The Alberti Program. You can often find her biking around the city, making letterpress prints, rock climbing, or nerding out about beer.