What Stories Can Do: From NYC Actor to USAID Strategic Communications Advisor by Way of Iraq

Alex Poppe, a former New York actor turned USAID strategic communications advisor, talks about the role of storytelling in her life and work, drawing on nearly a decade in northern Iraq teaching and volunteering in humanitarian response. She shares specific, complicated, funny, and heartbreaking stories of the people she worked with — stories that rarely surface in mainstream media, which tends to frame Iraq through war and geopolitical abstraction. Poppe, whose writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, also discusses her memoir-in-essays, *Breakfast Wine*, which received a starred Booklist review. The talk runs Thursday evening, November 19, from 6:30 to 7:30 PM at the Uptown library. Free, registration required. Accessibility accommodations are available with 14 business days’ notice.