The storytellers featured in this book developed and shaped their stories for the stage with The Moth’s team of directors:

MEG BOWLES is a Senior Director and one of the hosts of the Peabody Award–winning The Moth Radio Hour. Like many of the Moth staff, Meg started as a volunteer in 1997, helping to curate early Mainstage events and teaching storytelling workshops. In 2002 she was pulled away by Discovery Communications, mainly because she needed the paycheck, but when Moth founder George Dawes Green asked her to return to help curate the Mainstage in 2005, she found it impossible to say no. While directing stories for the Mainstage, Meg has had the privilege of working with a NASA astronaut who commanded the first shuttle mission after the loss of Challenger, a doctor who saved Mother Teresa’s life, a member of Churchill’s Secret Army who trained spies during WWII, an innocent man who spent eighteen years on death row, a Nobel Laureate, a lobster fisherman, neuroscientists, veterans, musicians, chefs, fugitives, mothers, fathers, and countless people who have found themselves in sometimes ordinary but often unique situations and have generously shared their experiences and emotions, exposing their imperfections—the very thing that makes us human and ultimately connects us to one another.

CATHERINE BURNS is The Moth’s longtime Artistic Director and one of the hosts of The Moth Radio Hour. As a lead director on the Mainstage since 2003, she has helped hundreds of people craft their stories, including a retired New York City detective, a jaguar tracker, and an exonerated prisoner. She is the editor of the two bestselling books, The Moth: 50 True Stories and All These Wonders. She is the director of the solo shows The Gates, written by and starring Adam Gopnik, and Helen & Edgar, written by and starring Edgar Oliver, which was called “utterly absorbing and unexpectedly moving” by Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Prior to coming to The Moth, she directed and produced television and independent films, interviewing such diverse talent as Ozzy Osbourne, Martha Stewart, and Howard Stern. She attended her first Moth back in 2000, fell in love with the show, and was in turn a GrandSLAM contestant and a volunteer in The Moth Community Program before joining the staff full-time. Born and raised in Alabama, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and young son.

MAGGIE CINO is an award-winning director and playwright living in Brooklyn. Her plays were published by Indie Theater Now, and excerpts appear in the Smith & Krause Best Men’s and Best Women’s Monologue series. The Villager called her “A writer of extraordinary versatility and imagination” and Time Out New York says, “Cino has a gift.” A former Senior Producer for The Moth, she directed storytelling shows nationally and internationally at venues including BAM, Lincoln Center, and the main stage of the Sydney Opera House.

JENIFER HIXSON is a Senior Director and one of the hosts of The Moth Radio Hour. Each year she asks hundreds of people to identify significant turning points in their lives—fumbles and triumphs, leaps of faith, darkest hours—and then helps them shape those experiences into story form for the stage. She falls a little bit in love with each storyteller and hopes you will, too. In 2000 she launched The Moth StorySLAM, which now has a full-time presence in twenty-nine cities in the United States, the UK, and Australia and provides more than six thousand individual storytelling opportunities for storytelling daredevils and loquacious wallflowers alike. Jenifer’s story “Where There’s Smoke” has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and This American Life and was a part of The Moth’s first book, The Moth: 50 True Stories.

SARAH AUSTIN JENNESS joined the staff at The Moth in 2005, and as Executive Producer she has worked with hundreds of people to craft and hone their personal stories. She is one of the hosts of the Peabody Award–winning The Moth Radio Hour and launched The Moth’s Global Community Program—coaching storytelling workshops in the US and Africa to highlight world issues, including family homelessness and public health. Moth stories she has directed in the past decade have been told before the UN General Assembly and as far afield as the Kenya National Theatre. She believes that stories have power and can change the world by creating connection.

CATHERINE McCARTHY is the manager of The Moth’s Education Program, where she helps students and educators to build community and challenge dominant narratives through personal storytelling. She is a story director for the Mainstage and is the co-editor of the Penguin Random House Teachers’ Guide for The Moth: All These Wonders. She has facilitated storytelling workshops for the US State Department, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the DreamYard Project, and at dozens of high schools around New York City. She also directed the award-winning solo show The Secret Life of Your Third-Grade Teacher at the 2016 NYC Fringe Festival. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Fordham University.

LARRY ROSEN is a master instructor with The Moth. He has been performing, teaching, directing, and producing storytelling, theater, improvisation, and sketch comedy for twenty-five years through institutions including Second City, the People’s Improv Theater, and the New York International Fringe Festival. A proud member of The Moth’s Global Community team, Larry has had the privilege of working with storytellers representing diverse communities throughout the United States and in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.

KATE TELLERS attended her first Moth event, fortuitously themed Beginnings, in 2007 and has never looked back. Hailed as a “storytelling guru” by the Wall Street Journal, she is the director of MothWorks at The Moth, where she has designed programs with nonprofits, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Ashoka Future Forum, as well as Facebook, Ogilvy + Mather, Nike, Google, and the US State Department, and developed stories with her heroes from her Pittsburgh childhood to the present day. She is a regular host and Mainstage storyteller. Her story, “But Also Bring Cheese,” is featured in The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown (Crown Archetype), in bookstores now. She lives in Brooklyn with her loud family and dog.

SARAH HABERMAN has been The Moth’s Executive Director since 2013. Prior to The Moth, Sarah held senior management and development positions for Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Columbia Business School, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Public Library. Before embarking on a career in the nonprofit sector, she spent six years as an acquiring editor in Paris for Robert Laffont-Fixot, a major French publishing house. She is a member of the board of directors for the Herzfeld Foundation in Milwaukee and served on The Moth’s Board of Directors until 2013.