Heart Broken, Heart Open: Taking a Pulse Before Mother’s Day
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Featuring a diverse roster of luminaries in mental health, spirituality, arts, and entertainment, this gathering provides a space to reflect on our relationship to matriarchs, mothers, and motherhood as we prepare for the holiday. We welcome motherless mothers and fathers, folks mourning miscarriage or children, and those grieving complicated relationships with living parents. We will honor family caregivers and those grieving their own health and inability to fulfill parental expectations. And we will acknowledge the collective grief of mothers in the U.S. and around the world due to injustice, murder, war, migration, and the climate crisis. Together we will share pain, love, courage, joy, and laughter.
Special guests include poet and psychologist Hala Alyan; jazz musicians Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Jarrett Cherner; playwright and humorist Andy Corren; television producer and writer Angela Nissel; educator and mental health advocate Tlazoltiani Jessica Zamarripa.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses — winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize — and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. In her deeply personal debut memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, Hala shares how her experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
Sarah Elizabeth Charles is a vocalist/composer based in New York City. She has worked with numerous artists, has led her band, SCOPE, for thirteen years and has recorded four critically acclaimed studio albums under her own name. Charles' musical output has been described as a “genre of one” by DownBeat Magazine, “soulfully articulate” by the NY Times and “an unmatched sound” by Jay Z’s Life+Times. In addition to her performances, Charles is also an active educator. She currently works as a lead teaching artist with Carnegie Hall at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and co-teaches two self-designed courses (with Caroline Davis) called Jazz and Gender and New Narratives: Creating Space for Equity in Music at The New School. In 2019, she was one of five recipients of the Yale School of Music's Distinguished Teaching Artist Award. In 2020, she became a selected member of the Joe’s Pub Working Group, a recipient of the NYC Women’s Fund grant for her band’s fourth album, Blank Canvas, and a recipient of Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works grant. In 2023, she was selected by Joe’s Pub to receive the New York Voices Commission for her song cycle set to Maya Angelou’s poetry and debuted her fifth album project Dawn inspired by her journey through miscarriage/birth/motherhood in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Room.
Hailed as “an impressive soloist and an immaculate accompanist” who is "particularly inventive”, Brooklyn-based pianist, composer and bandleader Jarrett Cherner has captivated listeners with his lyricism, technical facility and consistently evolving musical vision. He debuted on his own BaldHill Music label with the compelling trio release Burgeoning, which earned recognition from the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Awards. As a driving force behind the collective jazz quintet Sketches, Cherner released two albums, both critically acclaimed: Sketches Volume One and Volume Two. Cherner’s 2016 trio release Expanding Heart features bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Jason Burger in a set that reflects personal growth, combining original material with covers of wildly disparate songs by Vincent Rose, Otis Redding, and Ornette Coleman. Cherner united with vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles for their 2020 release Tone, an album that features eight original songs — finely wrought, emotive, and richly melodic. He has toured throughout the U.S., as well as in South America, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. A passionate educator as well, he has worked as a teaching artist with Carnegie Hall, taught for years at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, and maintains a private studio in Brooklyn, NY.
Andy Corren wrote an irreverent, honest, and loving obituary for his mother, “a loud, filthy‑minded (and filthy‑mouthed) Jewish lady redneck who birthed six kids.” After touching the hearts of millions around the globe, Andy adapted his tribute into the memoir Dirtbag Queen, one of Amazon’s “Best Books of 2025 (Biography)” and The Washington Post’s “10 Best Audiobooks of 2025”. He was born and raised on the wrong side of Fayetteville, North Carolina. He barely graduated Westover, got fired from every job in show business, and has no MFA. Andy and his son Hudson D. Dog live in Greene County, NY.
Angela Nissel is author of the national bestselling comedic memoirs The Broke Diaries and Mixed, and a prolific television producer and writer whose credits include The Other Black Girl, Mixed-ish and Scrubs. Prior to her television career, she had illustrious careers as a temp for the IRS, a stripper, and a “sleep apnea auditor” watching people snore overnight in a local hospital. Her new book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom is Dead, chronicles caring for her terminally ill mother while hiding financial troubles and navigating grief with humor and raw honesty. She lives in Los Angeles and enjoys beating people half her age in video games.
Tlazoltiani Jessica Zamarripa is co-director & co-founder of the Institute of Chicana/o/x Psychology & Community Wellness. She is a cultural educator, mental health advocate, and keeper of our ancestral wisdom. She is a speaker, workshop facilitator and restorative circle facilitator on such topics as parent and family engagement for Latinx and BIPOC families, mental health advocacy and reconnecting to ancestral and spiritual wisdoms for individual and collective wellbeing. Tlazoltiani also has experience working with and speaking to adolescents, particularly marginalized teens regarding positive identity development. She is a longtime mami-activist, Danzante de La Luna, Temazcalera and community organizer working toward social justice within Chicanx, Latinx & BIPOC communities. She is a founding member of Academia Cuauhtli, a local Austin language and cultural revitalization school program for Spanish speaking Mexican American elementary students.
