2024 LINEUP
Paul Strickland (Artistic Director)
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. In November of 2018 he made his NYC stage debut Off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse with his shadow and flashlight ghost story play "13 Dead Dreams of "Eugene."
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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. Selections from his show Levels of Difficulty can be heard on XM Sirius radio. www.AintTrue.com
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Lyn Ford
Lynette (Lyn) Ford is an internationally respected, fourth-generation Affrilachian storyteller, author, poet, and workshop presenter. Lyn's folktale adaptations and original stories are rooted in her family’s multicultural Black Appalachian (or Affrilachian) heritage. Lyn's work has taken her to major storytelling festivals and literacy and storytelling conferences across the country, as well as in Australia and Ireland, and, via the Zoomiverse, in Germany and for the Federation of Asian Storytellers story swaps. Lyn is an Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist and a Thurber House mentor for young authors, with more than thirty years of experience and several award-winning publications. Lyn is a two-time recipient of the National Storytelling Network's ORACLE Circle of Excellence award, and a 2023 recipient of the National Association of Black Storytellers' Black Appalachian Storytelling Fellowship and NABS' prestigious Zora Neale Hurston Award. Lyn is a member of the Writers Council of the National Writing Project and the National Association of Black Storytellers’ Brother Blue Circle of Elders. Lyn is also a certified laughter yoga teacher and, occasionally, pretty weird. www.storytellerlynford.com/
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Andy Offutt Irwin
With a manic, Silly Putty voice, astonishing mouth noises, and heart-filled stories, Andy Offutt Irwin is equal parts mischievous schoolboy and the Marx Brothers, peppered with a touch of the Southern balladeer. He has been a Featured Teller at the National Storytelling Festival eleven times and is a perennial favorite at the International Storytelling Center’s Teller-in-Residence series.
A storyteller, theatre director, singer-songwriter, and Shakespearean actor, Andy was Artist-in-Residence at Emory University’s Oxford College from 1991 to 2007. He has performed at LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in New York, The Library of Congress, Walt Disney World, and a whole mess of theatres, colleges, and festivals all over the United States
Andy lives in Covington, Georgia. He thinks he is funny. andyirwin.com/
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