Norah Dooley is a storyteller, critically acclaimed  children’ s author and educator , who, as co-founder of massmouth.com,  started a story slam series in Greater Boston. Norah’s widely acclaimed picture book, Everybody Cooks Rice is one of four titles in a series about her former neighborhood in Cambridge, MA.  She has published 6 storytelling CDs. Norah has a MEd in Creative Arts in Learning, Middle School and teaches storytelling, performance skills, directs theater and performs in schools, libraries and teacher’s conferences. She was the featured storyteller in the Christmas and Spring Revels in Cambridge and Boston MA, the Cambridge River Festival, Newport Folk Festival, Albany NY River Festival, 3 Apples Storytelling Festival, MA and at the Clearwater Festival.

Where I am coming from:
I grew up in NYC on Staten Island. We lived in a relatively rural area and the lady next door raised chickens-- hundreds of them. My sister and brother and I spent all our free time playing in the woods at Robin Hood,W.W.II combat and Knights of the Round Table, making bows,arrows,swords and scenarios. We were über geeks before there even were geeks.

When I was thirteen our family moved to the Boston area and I went to public school for the first time. Catholic parochial school had been the bane of my existence. There were sometimes as many as 60 students in a class and the teachers were harsh disciplinarians. Brookline public schools were a release and revelation.

After high school, I went to art school and worked at many jobs to support my "brilliant career" as a painter. I have been a cab driver, breakfast cook, bicycle courier, burglar alarm monitor, copy machine operator and waitress. But my favorite part time job was as a substitute teacher. While our children were young I went back to school and got a degree in education. It was in graduate school that I learned about storytelling as a vocation.

Hi resolution promo pics available on request.