Story Advisor / Editor Zoey has sung with choruses at some of the great music venues worldwide, including the Sydney Opera House, the Forbidden City opera house in Beijing, Palau de la Musica Catalan in Barcelona, and New York’s Carnegie and David Geffen Halls. A Vassar graduate with an MA and PhD in English, she enjoyed three decades teaching that subject. However, she has always performed music as well, including singing in the stage choruses of the Hudson Opera Theatre and Delaware Valley Opera. She has been a member of Warwick Valley Chorale, a 100-member community chorus, since 1978, and its president for more than ten years.

 Composer / Lyricist / Storyteller has blended music academia and performance in her education and career. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree in French horn performance from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University. She has taught at both Yale University and the State University of New York, Orange County Community College.  As a professional freelance musician on the French horn, she has performed in both local and international symphony orchestras and opera companies. As an orchestral conductor, Hilarie Clark Moore has over 20 years of experience conducting community orchestras.  Presently, she conducts the New London Community Orchestra and the Cheshire Symphony Orchestra in her home state of Connecticut. In addition to conducting, she is the founder and principal coach of Chamber Music by the River, a chamber music festival she runs from her music studio. In her first major work, The Fishergirl, she expresses her unique voice, “an alluring musical language” in her “Post Romantic” compositional style.

Dialogue Gwen Gunn was a cofounder of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective and has had her plays produced at The Theater for the New City, Westbeth Theater, The Joseph Jefferson Theater and The East Fourth Street Theater in Manhattan. She grew up in Dayton, Ohio, attended Duke University and graduated from Antioch College. After moving to New York, she married actor Moses Gunn, worked in child development research, and earned an M.A. from The New School for Social Research. She and her husband and two children moved to Connecticut in 1975 where she studied poetry with poet Richard Raymond and Professor Mark Johnston and co-edited the poetry magazine Embers. Gwen has had poems published in national and international journals and recently won two firsts in the Confederation of State Poetry Societies contests, one of which was the national Winners Circle Award. Her latest book of poetry is Tastes. She also worked as an editorial assistant and writer of theatrical bios for Sachem Publishing, and started a company

Orchestration Ron De Fesi (Orchestration) has been the Artistic Director of the Hudson Opera Theatre since its founding in 1977. A student of Sixten Ehrling while at the Juilliard School, he also attended the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany where he completed specialized study in Baroque and Classical performance practice. Additionally, he has a bachelor’s degree in pre-med from Manhattan College, and a graduate degree from New York University in music performance. As well as having been a guest conductor for numerous orchestral, choral, ballet, and opera companies, he has been artistic director and principal conductor for several organizations over the years. He has directed and/or conducted over 350 productions. He is also a basso cantante, and has performed over 100 roles in opera, oratorio, and musical theatre. He is an organist and choir director, plays the cello and the piano and teaches voice. A gifted and prolific arranger, his operatic and ballet reductions continue to be heard globally, as well as his arrangements for numerous instrumental ensembles of everything from classics to po.