FLORENCE-The countdown is on — Shoals Storytelling Festival returns May 14-16, and we’re excited to welcome you back for a weekend packed with laughter, inspiration, and the magic of live storytelling.
Tickets are officially available, and we’d love for you to be part of this year’s festival. Invite a friend, bring your family, or make it a solo adventure.
Grab your tickets early!
Donald Davis
Donald DavisDonald Davis was born in a Southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. While he heard many traditional stories about Jack and other heroic characters, he was most attracted to the stories of his own family and places of origin. Donald began retelling the stories he heard and then adding his own new stories to them until he was repeatedly asked to “tell it again, on purpose.” During his twenty-five-year career as a United Methodist Minister, Donald began to use stories more and more. He was also asked to begin performing at festivals and in other settings until he retired from the church to tell stories full time. The author of eighteen books and more than forty original recordings, Donald is the recipient of both the Circle of Excellence and the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Storytelling Network.
Dolores Hydock
Dolores HydockDolores talks with her hands. And her elbows. And her shoulders. When she speaks, she is literally irrepressible.” That’s how one reviewer described Dolores’ vivacious style that fills the stage with wit, energy, and a swirl of characters that populate her stories of family fireworks, food fads, true love, turnip greens, and other peculiarities of everyday life. Her award-winning personal stories, oral histories, medieval adventures, and traditional tales are, as one reviewer said, “…smart but not cynical, heartwarming yet never corny, traditional without being mundane…a neat feat!”
Dolores has been a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough and many other festivals, has served as Teller-in-Residence at the International Storytelling Center, and has won Resource Awards from Storytelling World Magazine for her twelve CDs of original stories.
Dolores Hydock is an actress and story performer, whose work has been featured at a variety of concerts, festivals, and special events throughout the U.S. She has been a featured storyteller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, has been Teller-in-Residence at Jonesborough’s International Storytelling Center, and her twelve CDs of original stories have all received Resource Awards from Storytelling World Magazine.
Dolores is originally from Reading, Pennsylvania, home of the Reading Railroad and Luden’s Cough Drops. Her hometown is where she won her first blue ribbon in storytelling in a local contest at the age of 5. The real gold letters on the blue ribbon convinced her there was obviously a fortune to be made in the performing arts. She continues to hope.
As an actress, she has been featured in the one-woman plays Tony Curtis Speaks Italian and All I can Say is ‘I Love You,’ Take a Ride on the Reading, In Her Own Fashion, Shirley Valentine, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Becoming Dr. Ruth, Fully Committed, The Lady With All the Answers, and Nothing Sacred: An Evening of Stories by Ferrol Sams. Her early theatrical career included portraying the Statue of Liberty in a Fourth of July pageant. The role required her to stand on a float in the middle of a pond, wearing a 20-pound electrified crown on her head. She somehow managed to survive that role without drowning or electrocuting herself, but has avoided historical dramas ever since.
Dolores lives in Birmingham, Alabama. In her spare time, she tends a garden that includes a pomegranate bush, muscadine vines, blueberry bushes, a 20-foot jujuba tree, and a family of slugs the size of cheap cigars. She’s held a wide variety of jobs: She’s been a house parent at a halfway house for juvenile delinquents, a blues DJ, an au pair in Paris for three small children, a computer sales representative for IBM, a cookbook copy editor, an acting teacher at Birmingham-Southern College, and a teacher of Cajun dancing. If anyone questions her strange path through such a variety of jobs, she simply says that it’s all just material for her stories.
Eric Kirkman
Eric KirkmanEric Kirkman uses singing and musical instruments to tell the African American influence on American music.
Bil Lepp
Bil Lepp is a study in contrasts. A thoroughly honest man, he is a five-time champion liar. Behind that “yup, yup, yup” persona is an absolutely brilliant mind—so smart he’s scary, but really funny too—kind of like a cross between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Robin Williams. An accomplished author, Bil Lepp’s books cover topics from parenting to very little things. As carefully architected as The Eiffel Tower, Bil’s stories often start out plausible, then quickly morph into the outrageous and fantastic. On occasion, he is completely serious and you can follow him into stories of the courage and honor of ordinary folks. But beware—Bil’s wit will hit and you will never see it coming!
Johnny Thomas Fowler
Johnny Thomas Fowler spins childhood tales and personal family yarns from the apron strings of both his Appalachian grandmothers—where memories sing, dance, and occasionally get up to a little mischief!
Jennifer Armstrong
Jennifer Armstrong is a singer, storyteller, piper and poet living in Asheville, North Carolina. She has made her living as a performer and teacher of traditional music, story and dance for the past fifty years. She started at age five singing in a family band and was blessed with bedtime stories and lullabies and shares her legacy wherever she goes.
She’s been a featured storyteller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro; interviewed by Studs Terkel on WFMT; and by Noah Adams on NPR. She’s sung with toddlers in church basements, told stories at library story nights, has published two children’s books, recorded seven CDs, and performed at thousands of schools nationwide.
She believes in our right to think for ourselves, the importance of creative self-expression, the joy of moving our bodies, the gift of lullabies to soothe and nurture and the expansiveness of gratitude and kindness.
She teaches old-time banjo, fiddle and bagpipe. She gives workshops in storytelling, poetry and songwriting. She is available for song and story programs in the Asheville area and across the country. She looks forward to visiting us and sharing the songs and stories that are important to our human family!
Media Release/Shoals Storytelling Festival
