Tell-All Boston Presents: From the Page to the World

Event Description

Porter Square Books: Boston Edition is excited to present Tell-All Boston for an evening celebrating four new GrubStreet memoirs. The evening’s program will feature special readings from Ani Gjika, Rachel Zimmerman, Karen Kirsten, and John Hamilton. This event will take place on Wednesday, November 13 at 7pm at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition (50 Liberty Drive, Boston, MA 02210).

RSVP here!

Virtual registration is available on Crowdcast here.

Tell-All Boston is Boston’s only live-on-stage literary reading series dedicated to the craft of memoir and personal essay. After two years of virtual readings, Tell-All Boston is excited to be back with an IN-PERSON event, brought to you by the alumni of the GrubStreet's Memoir Incubator and Essay Incubator co-sponsored by GrubStreet and Porter Square Books.

Albanian-born writer Ani Gjika is the award-winning author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Most recently, she is the recipient of the New Immigrant Writing Prize for her memoir, An Unruled Body, (Restless Books, 2023), which was a 2023 Foreword INDIES winner and on the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award longlist for nonfiction. Gjika moved to the U.S. when she was eighteen, earning a BA in English at Atlantic Union College, an MA in English at Simmons University, and an MFA in poetry at Boston University.

Gjika is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the NEA, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, the 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellowship through GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and residency fellowships from Banff Centre, Ledig House, and Millay Arts. Having taught creative writing at Asia-Pacific International University in Thailand and at Framingham State University, Boston University, and GrubStreet in the U.S., Gjika currently teaches social studies and literature to English language learners at Framingham High School. For more, visit her website at: https://www.anigjika.com

Rachel Zimmerman, an award-winning journalist, has written about health and medicine for more than two decades. She currently contributes stories on mental health to The Washington Post and previously worked as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and a health reporter for WBUR, Boston’s public radio station. Her essays and reporting have been published in The New York Times; Vogue; The Cut; O, The Oprah Magazine; The Atlantic; Slate; The Huffington Post; and Brevity, among others. Zimmerman is the author of Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide, published in June 2024 by the Santa Fe Writers Project.

Zimmerman is also co-author of The Healing Power of Storytelling; and The Doula Guide to Birth. She’s been awarded residencies at Millay Arts and the Turkeyland Cove Foundation and currently lives with her family in Cambridge, Mass.

John Hamilton was born into a spirited Irish-American family of singers and storytellers, paving the way for a life journey intertwining passions for both God and music. Breaking with his strict Catholic upbringing, he embarked on a career in music that immersed him in the colorful but perilous world of drugs, alcohol, nightclubs, and dangerous characters. A debilitating onset of panic disorder abruptly halted his musical pursuits, propelling him into the business world where he thrived as a creative director in advertising. Despite professional success, Hamilton's persistent quest for the transcendent led him to seminary and, eventually, to two decades of parish work as a United Church of Christ pastor. In Honest To God he eloquently chronicles the ongoing search for meaning in a world where institutions are crumbling, realizing that each discovery only marks the beginning of a new quest.

Karen Kirsten is an Australian-American writer and Holocaust educator. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, WIEZ in Poland, Boston's NPR, The Boston Herald, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and her Best American Essays-nominated piece, “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life,” was selected as a Narratively Best Ever story.