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Author Amy Hempel to Read at People & Stories Benefit
PRINCETON – With the short story, author Amy Hempel has established herself as “a quietly powerful presence in American fiction,” according to The New York Times. Hempel, winner of the 2008 PEN/Malamud award for the short story, will read from her work on May 1 at the Nassau Club during the 4th annual benefit cocktail reception for People & Stories, a nonprofit organization that, with the short story, has enriched the lives of thousands of people in prisons, halfway houses, senior centers, community centers, libraries and homeless shelters.
People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos introduces people to the power of literature. Participants in small groups, conducted in either Spanish or English and guided by trained coordinators, read, discuss, and sometimes write about short fiction, drawing on their own life experience to explore the stories. Programs are held throughout New Jersey, in the Philadelphia-area, and in New York.
People & Stories was founded by Sarah Hirschman in 1972, with seven Spanish-speaking women at a public housing project in Cambridge, MA. After moving to Princeton, Hirschman continued the program in Trenton for 12 years, working in Spanish, then branched into English. Since then, People & Stories has grown into a nonprofit organization that serves 900 to 1,000 people a year through 60 different programs led by 25 coordinators in 35 different locations. Hirschman says, “At first, I only wanted to share my own pleasure in literature with people who had no access to literature. But I soon realized that our way of reading and discussing short stories created new knowledge as the fictional text became intimately intertwined with our own lives and led to self-assurance and increased and self-worth, new strength, and satisfaction.”
Teacher and Program Coordinator Stephanie Hanzel Cohen of Lawrenceville leads both a men and women’s group at Bo Robinson Assessment and Treatment Center, a minimum security prison in Trenton. Her groups read, discuss and write about the stories and in the process, she says, people describe a new love for reading, find a new way to express themselves, and connect with other people. “The whole process really touches on intellectual, spiritual, and emotional facets that are hard to describe,” she says.
People & Stories is sustained by grant funding and private donors, and the private donations account for nearly 25 percent of the organization’s income. This makes events like the upcoming benefit crucial, particularly in these tough economic times. Hirschman is confident, though, that People & Stories will benefit from the Obama administration’s focus on both service and education. “We are opening up the world of higher education and culture to people who have never had the opportunity to experience it. We are a hinge between those two worlds.”
Amy Hempel, a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and Hobson Award winner, coordinates the graduate fiction writing program at Brooklyn College. She also teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University. Hempel has published four books of short stories, Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), Tumble Home (1997, and The Dog of Marriage (2005). All four are gathered in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006). Hempel won the coveted Rea Award for the Short Story, and Collected Stories won the Ambassador Book Award and was named one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year.
Tickets for the May 1 reception with Amy Hempel at the Nassau Club are $100. For more information, or to make a reservation, please contact People & Stories Executive Director Pat Andres at 609-393-3230 or e-mail: [email protected].

