The 9th Annual “Do Tell” Storytelling Festival will be returning to the Cultural Center this year! If you like a good story with a side of laughter, plan to join us on Friday, February 9th, 2024.
This year’s Storytelling Festival will feature the talents of Carol Cain, our Emcee, Antonio Rocha, and Andy Offutt Irwin. These tellers will be bringing their comical and heart-warming tales that will bring joy to your soul.
Carol Cain
Carol Cain first discovered the power of storytelling thirty-five years ago, as a new mother, when her 12th grade English students begged for stories about her son as a way to get her off the topic of British literature. She continued to tell stories in her classroom until her retirement after thirty years of teaching language arts and theatre arts with the Troup County School System in LaGrange, Georgia. In addition to being her school system’s Teacher of the Year for 2000, Carol was named a top five finalist for Georgia’s 2001 Teacher of the Year.
Carol has been a member of the Azalea Storytelling Festival planning committee since the festival’s inception in 1997. She has been the emcee of the Azalea Festival for the past eleven years and was a featured teller in 2015 and 2022.
In addition to her work at museums, schools, churches, senior centers, and libraries throughout the Southeast, Carol performed at the 2011 Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Orem, Utah. She is featured on the Donald Davis workshop video entitled “What's Your Story?” which has been broadcast on both BYU-TV and North Carolina Public Broadcasting. More recently, Carol portrayed Captain Nancy Hill Morgan, organizer of a female Civil War militia, in a documentary called “The Nancy Hart Militia: Women of Uncommon Courage” which debuted on Georgia Public Broadcasting. For the past twenty-eight years, Carol has performed as Rosie the Riveter at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia and other locations throughout the U.S.
Antonio Rocha
Antonio Rocha, originally from Brazil, began his career in the performing arts in 1985. Mr. Rocha’s unique and award winning fusion of mime and spoken word has been performed from Singapore to South Africa and many places in between including 20 countries on 6 continents as well as 44 US states. Some of the venues include The Singapore Festival of the Arts, Wolf Trap, The National Storytelling Festival, The Kennedy Center, The Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, The Smithsonian Institution, The National Geographic, The Tales of Graz in Austria, Dunya Festival in Holland as well as many other Storytelling Festivals and educational institutions around The USA and abroad.
A two time TEDx speaker, Antonio Rocha is a recipient of the coveted Circle of Excellence Award by the National Storytelling Network and the 2024 Maine Arts Commission Performing Arts Fellow. www.storyinmotion.com
Andy Offutt Irwin
One of the most sought after performing storytellers in the United States, Andy Offutt Irwin is especially known for relating the adventures of his eighty-five-year-old-widowed-newly-minted-physician-aunt, Marguerite Van Camp, a woman who avoids curmudgeonship by keeping her finger on the pulse of the changing world around her as she seeks to grow – even at her advanced age – in the New South.
October of 2023 will mark Andy’s eleventh year as a Featured Teller at the National Storytelling Festival. He has appeared sixteen times as Teller in Residence at the International Storytelling Center. Among other gigs, Andy has been a Guest Artist at La Guardia High School of Art, Music, and Performing Arts in New York (The “FAME!” School); he has been a Keynote Speaker/Performer at the Library of Congress-Virburnum Foundation Conference on Family Literacy; a Guest Writer Performer with the Georgia Tech Glee Club; and a guest composer with the Amherst College Men’s Double Quartet.
Andy is the recipient of many awards, but he is tickled to be recognized by his peers by being presented the Oracle Circle of Excellence from the National Storytelling Network.