Gioia Timpanelli is the author of the novels What Makes a Child Lucky (2013) and Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily (1998), winner of the 1999 American Book Award. She is one of the founders of the worldwide revival of storytelling. Often called the “Dean of American Storytelling,” she is today considered one of the world’s foremost storytellers-widely respected as both a master and scholar of the ageless art. She won two Emmy Awards for her series of programs on storytelling, Stories from My House, on educational television, where she created, wrote, produced, and appeared in eight series of literature programs shown on PBS stations all over the United States. She has also received the prestigious Women’s National Book Association Award for bringing the oral tradition to the American public and recently the Maharishi Award for “promoting world harmony wherever she goes by enlivening within the listener that field of pure consciousness that is the source of all stories.”
She has performed her improvisational telling of ancient and modern stories and given talks in collaboration with respected masters of other art forms-especially in the world of poetry and letters (Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, James Hillman, Nor Hall, and Gary Snyder) throughout the United States, including The New School, The Art Institute of Chicago, The University of California, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The American Museum of Natural History, Il Santuario De Guadalupe in Santa Fe, John Hancock Hall in Boston, the Laurel Theatre in Knoxville, Riverwalk in New Orleans, the 1980 Winter Olympics, the Spoleto Festival, The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and many other venues. She has also performed in Canada, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Greece. Her radio series “Told and Retold” is on both PRX and NPR’s ContentDepot.
