Tar Heel Tellers Storytelling Festival

The statewide North Carolina Storytelling Guild will bring its Annual Tar Heel Tellers Storytelling Festival to Hendersonville for the first time. This year’s event is special because it will celebrate the Twentieth Anniversary of the founding of the Guild. The event will be hosted by the Henderson County Main Library at 301 N. Washington Street 28739 in Hendersonville on Saturday November 3rd from 10:00-4:00 pm with the main concert at 2:00 pm showcasing storytelling by the founders of NCSG in Kaplan Auditorium. The featured N.C.S.G.tellers include three tellers from the Asheville area: Gwenda Ledbetter,the Story Lady from WLOS TV, a frequent teller at the Jonesboro Annual Storytelling Festival and the recipient of the National Storytelling Network Circle of Excellence Award. Gwenda will be introduced by David Holt, televison host and four time Grammy Award winner; Marvin Cole, a nationally known storyteller who performs costumed presentations of Mark Twain stories; and Sandra Gudger, the founder of Asheville Storytelling Circle. They will be joined in the concert by Sylvia Payne, the editor of the Tar Heel Journal; Ron Jones, the recipient of the Order of the Long Leaf Pine Award presented by Governor James B. Hunt; Cynthia Moore Brown, internationally known event speaker and author of several books including ‘Pirates and Ghosts of the Carolinas’; Sheila Brown Evans, the Director of Hoke County Public Library; and Dianne Hackworth, the founder of several North Carolina Storytelling Festivals, including the Beech Mountain Jack Tales Festival in honor of well know storyteller Ray Hicks, an acclaimed storyteller who performed authentic Jack Tales at the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro.

There will be a special concert of stories and folk music from 12:30-1:30 by Cindy Carpenter, who founded the Songcatcher Series at Pisgah Forest and Elena Diana Miller, chair of this event, President,eo of NCSG, and the founder of the Carl Sandburg Annual Storytelling/Folk Music Festival at Carl Sandburg Home NHS. Both performers were folk musicians at Carl Sandburg Home in Flat Rock.