TELL is an evening of story telling from the mouths and minds of queers in NYC hosted by Drae Campbell at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division since February 2014.

The Dead is the theme of the twentieth installment of TELL. Featuring Heather M. Ács, Susana Cook, Melissa Febos, and Svetlana Kitto. 

$10 suggested donation – no one turned away for lack of funds

Drae Campbell is a writer, actor, director, story teller, dancer, and nightlife emcee. Drae has been featured on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and on stages all over NYC. Drae’s directing work has appeared in Iceland, NYC, Budapest and in the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The short film Drae wrote and starred in with Rebecca Drysdale, YOU MOVE ME won the Audience Award for Outstanding Narrative Short at OUTFEST 2010 and has been shown in festivals globally. Drae won the grand prize at the first annual San Miguel De Allende Storytelling Festival in Mexico. She once reigned as Miss LEZ and also got dubbed “the next lezzie comedian on the block” by AfterEllen.com for her comedic stylings on the interwebs. Campbell hosts and curates a monthly queer storytelling show called TELL at BGSQD. Check her out online!  www.draecampbell.com

HEATHER M. ÁCS is a Brooklyn-based, multi-media theatre performance artist, activist, curator, educator and high-femme troublemaker. Her work has been featured in festivals, theatres, and galleries across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including Vauxhall Tavern in London, Les Complices Gallery in Zurich, W2 Gallery in Vancouver, B.C., and the Public Theater, HERE Arts Center, the Kitchen, Dixon Place, the Culture Project, and the International Fringe Festival in New York City.

Born in Argentina, Susana Cook is a New York based playwright, director and performer who has been presenting original work for over 30 years. Her work is bold and funny, sometimes surrealistic and poetic, cleverly tackling issues of social justice. She approaches her theater as a ritualistic transformative force.  Her most recent work focuses on the fluidity of presence and absence, life and death.

Her work has been presented in numerous performance spaces in New York City, including Dixon Place, W.O.W Cafe Theater and The Kitchen. She also teaches and performs internationally in Spain, France, India, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Canada.

Some of her latest  shows are : Conversations with Humans, We Are Caligula, The Funeral of the Cow, The Homophobes, The Fury of the Gods, Homeland Insecurities,  The idiot King, The Values Horror Show, 100 Years of Attitude, Dykenstein, Hamletango, Prince of Butches, Gross National Product, Hot Tamale, Conga Guerrilla Forest, The Fraud, Butch Fashion Show in the Femme Auto Body Shop, Rats: The Fantasy of Extermination and Tango Lesbiango.

Her work is archived at the Digital Video Library of The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics of New York University.

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the forthcoming essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017). Her work has appeared in venues including The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Post Road, Salon, New York Times, Guernica, Hunger Mountain,Portland Review, Electric Literature, Dissent, Poets & Writers, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, and she has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, Anderson Cooper Live, CNN’s Dr. Drew, and elsewhere. Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The MacDowell Colony. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and co-curated the Manhattan reading and music series, Mixer, for eight years. The daughter of a sea captain and a psychotherapist, she was raised on Cape Cod and lives in Brooklyn.

Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in New York City. Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in Salon, VICE, the New York Observer, the Huffington Post, ART21, OutHistory, Plenitude and the book Occupy (Verso, 2012) among other publications and anthologies. She has contributed oral histories to the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She is currently at work on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian, and is the name of that country’s first gay club.