The 2025 Festival features a fantastic lineup!
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Ed Stivender, Pippa White,
Michael D. McCarty,
Paul Strickland and Priscilla Howe all-in-one Festival weekend!
The best-of-the-best will again be at the Kansas Storytelling Festival, Downs, KS, on April 25-26, 2025.
2025 PERFORMERS
Ed Stivender
Since 1977, when he left his day job as a high school teacher in Connecticut and turned to storytelling full-time, Ed has fabulated his way around the globe --appearing in schools, churches, coffeehouses and theaters, as well as at major storytelling festivals. He has been a featured performer at the National Storytelling Festival, the Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival in Ireland, Graz Festival, Austria and our own Philadelphia Folk Festival. Ed has enjoyed narrating “Paddington Bears Special Day” with the Harrisburg Symphony, “Ferdinand the Bull” with a violinist for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and “Peter and the Wolf” with the LaGrange Symphony.
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The National Storytelling Association inducted Ed into its Circle of Excellence in 1996.
Paul Stickland
Paul Strickland is a professional storyteller and theatre artist who lives in Kentucky. He has well over 7 hours of unique family friendly stories in his repertoire. Paul was an FEATURED TELLER: NEW VOICE at the National Storytelling Festival in 2023. He was also a Featured Teller at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in September of 2023, and has been a featured teller at several major storytelling festivals, including the Cave Run Storytelling Festival, in 2022.
Always adapting to whatever audience is in front of him, Paul LOVES telling stories in every imaginable environment, from comedy clubs to elementary and middle schools, corporate events and even two prisons - where he was NOT an inmate at the time. Collections of his stories have won "Best of Fest" honors more than 16 times at Fringe Theatre Festivals in the US and Canada.
Pippa White
PIPPA WHITE calls her One’s Company Productions “part theatre, part storytelling, part history.” Audiences call them unique, captivating, and touching. To date she has crisscrossed the country many times as a professional storyteller, touring to over 30 states, performing at universities and colleges, conferences, performing arts centers, museums, libraries, and festivals.
Pippa has performed three times at the United Solo Theatre Festival in New York City, where she garnered a review that called her work “………..riveting, heartbreaking and suspenseful.” An audience member recently captured the gist of Pippa’s unique presentations when he said, “her performances are entertainment wrapped in history intertwined with “inspiration”.
Michael D. McCarty
My mother read and told me stories always. I began formerly telling stories in high school in the 60’s when I discovered amazing stories of Black history and culture that weren’t taught in schools.
In 1992 I discovered the world of professional storytelling, and I’ve been telling stories and teaching storytelling around the country and around the world ever since.
I specialize in stories of African and African-American history and culture, multi-cultural stories, etc. Since 2014 I’ve worked in California prisons as part of the Arts In Corrections program teaching inmates how to find, develop and tell their stories.
My life has been one heaven of a story: Student activist, Black Panther, US Army martial arts instructor, acupuncturist, world traveler, spiritual seeker, construction worker, storyteller, husband, father, crazy friend. Never a dull moment!
I LOVE my life;-)
Priscilla Howe
Priscilla Howe offers a disclaimer, with a little wink: "All my stories start with the seed of truth." She has been a full-time storyteller since 1993, after being first an academic librarian (a Slavic Cataloger, really!) and then a children's librarian. Though she’s known primarily as a performer for children, she has a full repertoire of stories for grownups and older kids, from the 95-minute Medieval epic Tristan and Iseult, to laugh-inducing literary and folktales, to Grimm for Grownups, to quirky original stories. Priscilla tours the country and abroad telling stories and giving workshops—to date she has performed in the fourteen countries. She’s also looking for the best restaurant pie on earth.
