Storyteller and author Regi Carpenter will perform at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on May 15-16.
Carpenter’s performances at UAB’s Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center are part of a weeklong residency with the UAB Institute for Arts in Medicine. The performances will be at 7 p.m. each night. Tickets are $5 and support AIM programs at the UAB Center for Psychiatric Medicine. For tickets, call 205-975-2787 or visit www.AlysStephens.org.
For more than 20 years, Carpenter has used the power of stories to motivate and inspire. She brings a remarkable blend of warmth, humor and depth to every performance she gives. Her stories have been featured on Sirius Radio, Apple Seed Radio, The Moth and National Public Radio. Her story “Snap!” is the true tale of her severe mental illness as a teen and her journey back to reality; it is a winner of the Boston Story Slam. Carpenter captivates audiences with traditional stories from around the world, as well as stories of her irrepressible family, growing up in the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River in Clayton, New York, for four generations.
Her memoir, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner: Stories of a Seared Childhood,” brings life to her humor and honesty. Carpenter is also the founder of Stories with Spirit, an initiative dedicated to bringing songs of joy and stories of hope to grieving children and the people who love and care for them in homes, hospices and hospitals.
In a TEDx talk, Carpenter said there is only one story — one of love and connection. Carpenter said of her first experience telling stories to gravely ill children that she “saw that the stories were acting as a medicine for things that no medicine can cure — loneliness, isolation and fear. I saw that the stories were so powerful they could heal a broken mind, a broken spirit, a broken heart.”
The UAB Arts in Medicine program, initiated in 2013, is a partnership between UAB Medicine and UAB’s Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center and aims to transform the health care environment and enhance healing and wellness for patients, visitors and staff through creative arts experiences.