Norah Dooley is one of New England’s most popular storytellers, giving performances at schools and libraries all over the region. She is also a musician and published author. Those who have not had the opportunity to attend her performances or listen to her CD’s may be familiar with her picture book Everybody Cooks Rice, one of four in a series of children’s books about her neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Norah credits storytelling as a creative source and discipline for her writing. “I started telling bedtime stories to our children. After they fell asleep, I wrote them down. I still work out story ideas by telling them.” says Dooley, educator and mother of four. “Storytelling is an underutilized part of our human heritage. It is one of the best teaching tools I know. You can tell things to kids in a story that they’d never listen to in any other form.”