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. In reviews of his work, Ed Stivender has been called “the Robin Williams of storytelling” by the Miami Herald and “a Catholic Garrison Keillor” by Kirkus Review.
Fran Stallings is an American storyteller for people of all ages. She has performed at national and international storytelling festivals, in schools and libraries, and on the radio. She performs primarily folktales from around the world. She has produced several audio recordings and books of stories. She conducts workshops, residencies, and festival performances throughout the United States and overseas.
Stallings’s storytelling style is noted for its ability to entrance listeners, a phenomenon she wrote about for The National Storytelling Journal. She teaches educators to use stories in the classroom to hold students’ attention while conveying lessons.
Elisa began her storytelling career by working for ten years as a Storyteller in Residence in the Boston Public Schools. There she came to appreciate and tell stories from the many diverse cultures that the children represented. Other early storytelling experiences included collecting stories from Vietnam Veterans and sharing them with high school, college and adults in a program called, The Defoliated Heart. She also led groups of women to share and learn from their stories together. These experiences helped to inspire her belief in the power of stories to heal.
Recently her most popular storytelling programs in the schools are on character education and bullying prevention through story. She received a grant in 2002 to study character education through story from the National Storytelling Network.
She is a currently a board member of The Healing Story Alliance www.healingstory.org and is an active member of The League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling (LANES), and past Board member. You can learn more about LANES and the storytelling conference at www.lanes.org
Lev Ropes “Grandbear the Storyteller”
Grandbear (Lev Ropes), tells a variety of stories for adults and kids about people and animals (Coyote shows up a lot) who live in the West, including his cousin’s Montana Ranch. His stories range from fact to fantasy, and from humorous to heart warming.
Host – Isabelle Hauser
A fairy tale believer since the beginning of her time, Isabelle Hauser discovered the path of storytelling training with professional storyteller Liz Weir in Northern Ireland. When Isabelle is not telling tales or playing the harp on various stages in Switzerland and abroad, you can find her talking to the swans on the shore of her hometown lake, looking for four leaf clover, or chasing rainbows in the surrounding forests.
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