CURE Epilepsy Hosts Event to Kick Off Epilepsy Awareness Month

The CURE Epilepsy team has invited me to share info on a fundraising event they are hosting in NYC in honor of Epilepsy Awareness Month.

This unique event will feature famous soprano Renée Fleming in conversation with a neurologist, a music therapist, and our immediate past board chair Kelly Cervantes about the intersection of the arts and neuroscience, specifically epilepsy.

If you are in the NYC area this promises to be a very interesting evening and as always with CURE the money goes directly to support epilepsy research. Happy to answer any questions you might have and/or provide additional promotional materials.

CURE Epilepsy Hosts a Conversation with Renée Fleming

Renée Fleming is one of the most acclaimed singers of our time, performing on the stages of the world’s greatest opera houses and concert halls. Honored with five Grammy® awards and the US National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Super Bowl.

Renée’s current concert calendar includes appearances in London, Milan, Paris, and at Carnegie Hall. In November, she starred in the world premiere staging of The Hours, a new opera based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and award-winning film, at the Metropolitan Opera. She won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo Album for Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene.

A leading advocate for research at the intersection of arts and health, Renée launched the first ongoing collaboration between The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the NIH. She is a founding advisor for the Sound Health Network at UCSF.

Discussion with Kelly Cervantes

Kelly Cervantes is an award-winning writer, speaker, and advocate best known for her blog Inchstones, where she shared the stress, love, and joy that came with parenting her medically complex daughter, Adelaide. Since Adelaide’s passing, just five days shy of her fourth birthday in October of 2019, Kelly has continued to write candidly about her arduous and, at times, contradictory grief journey.

Her debut book, Normal Broken: The Grief Companion for When it’s Time to Heal But You’re Not Sure You Want to is a USA Today Bestseller and is available everywhere books are sold. She has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Cosmopolitan, as well as quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and People. She is the former board chair for the nonprofit CURE Epilepsy and also hosts their biweekly podcast, Seizing Life, where she interviews scientists, doctors, and individuals affected by epilepsy.

Kelly resides in Maplewood, NJ, with her husband, Miguel Cervantes former star of Hamilton on Broadway, their children, and two dogs, Tabasco and Sriracha.