alm books

Bar Scott is best known for her voice and her songwriting. With The Present Giver, she debuts her writing in the form of memoir. Bar’s 2007 CD release Parachute, was voted amongst the top five of the year by Performing Songwriter Magazine. ASCAP has acknowledged Bar’s work with one of their highly coveted Special Awards for eleven consecutive years. She has performed at The Beacon Theater (NYC), the annual New Year’s Eve Peace Concert at St John the Divine (NYC), Clearwater Music Festival, Terrytown Music Hall and The Kimmel Center (Philadelphia) as well as many other venues large and small throughout the northeast. She has released six full-length recordings of original songs, as well as several CDs of cover songs. In 2009, she was invited by the Woodstock Memoir Festival to take part in a performance of autobiographical songs. At that same festival, she was the keynote reader at the final event of the festival, at which she read excerpts from this first book. She has spent nearly three years working with writer Abigail Thomas (A Three Dog Life), and was recently accepted by Tin House magazine to work with David Shields (Reality Hunger) in the their annual summer workshops. The Present Giver is the natural progression of Bar’s work. Her journey as a writer began in 2000 with the diagnosis of her 2-year old son Forrest’s stage IV liver cancer. Within days, she began what is now called a blog in which she described her thoughts and feelings as Forrest’s life unfolded.