Join us for Memorial Day weekend events as we celebrate
the 221st birthday of our namesake!

Saturday, May 25
1-2:30pm
View the PBS award-winning documentary Nature: Walking with Emerson and Thoreau. Produced with TigerLion Arts and starring Tyson Forbes, the great, great, great, grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Forbes joins us for a live Zoom Q&A and to share his experiences on the making of Nature.

Sunday, May 26
1-2:30pm
Live Kaatscast podcast with Brett Barry, featuring:
•Bill Birns, Catskills historian and author
•Leslie T. Sharpe, naturalist and nature writer
•Catskills trivia and prizes, and
•Music by Steve Koester!

PLUS, take 22% off one item May 25-27 at The Shops at Emerson!

Events are FREE. Seating is limited!

BIOS

Tyson Forbes is the great, great, great grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Producing
Artistic Director of TigerLion Arts (TLA). He serves as a writer, performer, designer, and
producer for all TLA’s original productions, including the national tour of Nature ~ an outdoor
telling of Emerson, Thoreau and their mutual love of the natural world. Tyson has extensive
performing experience with multiple appearances at the Guthrie Theater, Jungle Theater,
Ordway, and Ten Thousand Things Theater, as well as regional theaters across the country. He
has specialized in outdoor performance for over two decades and has a great passion for
nature. Tyson teaches physical theater at Circus Juventas, and is the proud parent of two young
lads, along with his wife and artistic partner, Markell Kiefer. When he’s not performing, he is
designing and building homes with Whole Builders.

Brett Barry hosts and produces his popular Kaatscast podcast from his Silver Hollow Audio
studios, located in the heart of the Catskills. He also teaches podcasting and audio production in
the Digital Media & Journalism department at SUNY New Paltz.
Brett graduated from Syracuse University’s television, radio and film program and worked as an
associate documentary producer for several years before launching a career in voice-overs in
2002. He returned to Syracuse 10 years later for a graduate degree in television-radio-film.

Brett is represented in NYC by Access Talent for television and radio commercials, audiobooks,
promos, and narration. He’s the host of public radio’s “Sound Beat” was the longtime voice of
India’s English-language network, Zee Café, and the last announcer for the iconic soap opera
Guiding Light. He has narrated more than 125 audiobooks and is a proud member of SAG-
AFTRA.

Bill Birns was honored to be named one of 50 Stewards of the Catskills by the Catskill Center
for Conservation and Development, on the Center’s 50th birthday. A citizen of the Town of
Middletown, in Delaware County, for over 50 years, Bill has long been active in local civic
affairs, serving, at various times, as a member of the Margaretville Hospital Board of Directors,
the Village of Fleischmanns Zoning Board of Appeals, John Burroughs’ Woodchuck Lodge
Board of Trustees, and other community-service commitments.

A Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Bill is the author of
the recently re-released A Catskill Catalog, available from Purple Mountain Press
(nysbooks.com). He has also written and published I Was Corning a Beaver Like You Do: Joe
Hewitt, John Burroughs, Mountain Culture (John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge & Mountain Arts
Media); and two books of locally-focused verse: The Myth in the Mountain, exploring real and
imagined history of the New Kingston Valley, and Fleischmanns in Verse.
Over 36 years, Bill taught a couple generations of Catskill Mountain kids, at Margaretville
Central School and at Onteora High School. Father, grandfather, and Uncle Billy, he lives in
Fleischmanns with his wife, Gayla, and dog, Murray.

Leslie T. Sharpe is a naturalist and nature writer. Her book, The Quarry Fox and Other Critters
of the Wild Catskills (Abrams, 2017), the “first literary treatment of Catskills wildlife since John
Burroughs,” won a Gold Medal “IPPY” (Independent Book Publishers) Award for excellence. In
2020, the Quarry Fox audiobook, with Leslie reading, was produced by the estimable Brett
Barry and Silver Hollow Audio. In 2019, Leslie was named one of “Fifty Stewards of the
Catskills” by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. In 2022, her essay, “The
Bluebird Chronicles: A Catskills Romance,” was featured in a collection of essays appearing
in Appalachia Journal that treated issues of environmental concern, especially climate change,
affecting the Catskills. As a columnist for New York Newsday, Leslie often wrote essays on
urban nature and environmental issues affecting city life. Her critter poems for kids, of which she
is very proud, have appeared in Ladybug Magazine. Leslie also served as Vice President of the
NYC Audubon Society and editor of The Urban Audubon. She is currently at work on a new
book exploring the secret lives of our wildest, most intimate companions, the not-so-domestic
cat.

Steve Koester is the singer, songwriter and guitarist behind Two Dark Birds, a band from the
Catskill Mountains. Since 2008, they have released four critically acclaimed albums, as well as
the most recent EP Porous.
The music has been called “knockout gorgeous” and “timeless… great rock music” and has
received glowing reviews everywhere from Fader and Nylon to The Village Voice and The New
York Times, showing up on year-end Best Of lists in Magnet, Popmatters, Rhapsody, Disclaimer
and more. Koester has also written, recorded and produced a wide variety of songs for TV and
film.

MORE PRESS ON TWO DARK BIRDS

“Poised, structured, self-aware, ambitious.” – DVeight

“….there certainly is a magic to it, a kind of backwoods witchery that the only the best of the style
can really capture.” – Culture Collide

“…brimming with pastoral energy and light. There’s a quiet dignity to the songs, no grand or
elaborate veneering.” – Chronogram

“… takes on the populist challenge of the form: how to be at once folk-accessible and lit- deep,
how to wed image to experience and emotion without ever getting too fine or too poetic for the
idiom. Koester hits the mark again and again…” – Woodstock Times

For more, visit TwoDarkBirds.com