Gerry Albarelli
Gerry Albarelli is an American writer, artist, teacher, and oral historian. His work explores personal stories, memory, identity, and the experiences that shape people’s lives. He has worked with the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research and has taught writing and oral history. His creative work includes books, essays, poetry, visual art, and oral history projects.
Columbia Center for Oral History
September 11 Oral History
In this panel from the Injured Cities Conference, moderator Gerry Albarelli joins Mary Marshall Clark to discuss the September 11 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, an extensive initiative that collected thousands of hours of testimony between 2001 and 2005. Albarelli emphasizes a literary, collaborative approach to these interviews, urging narrators to move beyond the “official” media narratives of war and revenge to explore complex, personal life histories.
Writer. Artist. Teacher. Oral Historian.
Exploring the stories, memories, and experiences that shape our lives.
What others have been saying about “The Oral History” …
Esther Rowland
Gerry was the person who helped that story come alive. He is an expert “book-doctor”, a master at dialogue, at creating scenes, at story-structure, at fact-checking. He is a well-informed, well-read and highly intelligent person who is also a great listener and a compassionate coach…
Grace Paley
Jerald [/Gerry] Albarelli is a wonderful writer — and now filmmaker. As a writer, he is direct, simple and original all at once. No one else I know can make a sentence that seems like ordinary speech and is, at the same time, dense with meaning, memory…
Robert Abrams
Gerry is a gifted writer and editor. He has a warm open personality and is someone with whom it is very easy to work. He has a good sense of humor and so if you work with him you will find yourself engaged in laughter.
Eva Kollisch
His [Gerry’s] highly original book, Teacha! is testimony both to his literary skill and his brilliance as a teacher. As a young man of Italian Catholic descent, he taught boys in a Satmar Hassidic yeshiva in Brooklyn. There is humor here, a vivid recreation of sectarian rules and reflexes, and tender portrayal of his students.
Ellen Weiss
It is absolutely amazing how Gerry, as he chooses to be called, can place himself in anyone’s shoes, including those of an 88 year old woman. He understands the human condition…His genius: ability to address the subtle pull of one word over another to suggesting a global change or modification of a broad overall theme.