Join us in the Community Room of St. Louis Public Radio on February 13th for an evening of true, personal stories about situations that are in our control, until the moment they aren’t.
This show will be open to limited in-pesron seating, and tickets can also be purchased to view the online stream.
Hosted by Gabe Montesanti and Sam Lyons
Stories by:
Jessica Gazzola put down roots in St. Louis in 2004. She tends a community orchard in her Tower Grove East neighborhood and can be found cooking and serving up food to neighbors at Kitchen House Coffee. In a previous life she served as priest and associate pastor to a local Ecumenical Catholic Community. Now, as a Christian priestess and co-foundress of Sophia Rising, she collaborates on communal rituals and uses her love of media and design to amplify the brilliance of spiritual leaders in St. Louis and beyond. Jessica is a proud parent within a big blended family that includes a surrogate baby living abroad. Giving birth and bearing witness to death have been her greatest teachers. Jessica loves the vulnerable beauty of live storytelling and feels honored to share a piece of her story through this powerful medium on the Story Collider stage.
Ken Haller is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. He serves on the boards of the Arts & Education Council of Greater St. Louis, the Saint Louis University Library Associates, and the Gateway Media Literacy Project. He has also served on the board of the Missouri Foundation for Health and as President of the St. Louis Pediatric Society; the Missouri Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; PROMO, Missouri’s statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization; the Gateway Men’s Chorus, St. Louis’s gay men’s chorus: 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.
Colleen McDermott, originally from Philadelphia, is a current junior at Washington University in St. Louis. Studying environmental analysis and writing, Colleen loves both conservation and communications. Working on a forestry crew in New Mexico sparked an interest in trees and fire ecology. Currently, they serve as a campus writing tutor, student coordinator for the Tyson Conservation Corps, and communications associate for WashU's Tyson Research Center. They have presented at the 2022 Missouri and Kansas Environmental Education Conference, and their writing has been published in Remake and the winnow magazine. When not tromping around outside or sitting in front of a Word doc, Colleen is an avid percussionist, having played for their high school marching band, a drum and bugle corps, and now their campus wind ensemble.
Danny Wicentowski is a journalist and storyteller in St. Louis, where he's reported on politics, crime, development, education and other beats. Before making the jump to St. Louis Public Radio in 2022, Danny worked for more than eight years as a staff writer for St. Louis’ alt-weekly the Riverfront Times, where his investigative and feature stories won multiple local and national awards. In 2020, he co-produced and hosted the podcast American Skyjacker, chronicling the life and crimes of plane hijacker Martin McNally. Danny lives in Bevo Mill with a black cat and many notebooks.
Sam Lyons is a comedian, musician, actor, and Gilmore girls enthusiast - and not always in that order! He joined our Story Collider staff with an aversion to science, but the practice of sharing his own stories and helping other tellers with them as opened his eyes to how science is all around us, ready to embrace without strangling. You can likely catch Sam and his partner Emma feeding feral cats in an alley near you.