“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else." — Toni Morrison

Please join Housing Works and LIVE TO TELL (words+music+theater professionals, educators, activists) to start the story (be a part of the story) of the next generation of great American writers!

With readings and a very special performance by singer-songwriter Be Steadwell, this event introduces a revolutionary new model for sharing the power of platform with a community of wildly undervalued and underestimated talents—female and non-binary New Yorkers, age 13 to 19. Their stories are by definition provocations in a world where to be young and honest is seen as a radical act.

LIVE TO TELL are committed to opening up opportunities, access, spaces, stages—starting with this one, the launch at Housing Works. They've set up a model so that at least half the house is always young people, our favorite collaborators, with something to say, learn, teach us all.

Power to truth. Stories to stage.