Attention School Media Specialists, Teachers, Youth Leaders, and Parents. Hillsborough County is gearing up for its Twenty-Eighth Annual Storytelling Festival!

The Culminating Festival will be held Saturday, April 12th, 2008, from 9:00 am - 4:00 pm at Middleton High School. Middleton is located at 4801 22nd Street, Tampa, FL, between Hillsborough Avenue & Martin Luther King Boulevard. (See a map). The Festival is free and open to the public.

In addition to this year's Featured Storyteller Dovie Thomason, the festival also features hundreds of school-aged Festival Quality Storytellers, community storytellers of all ages, balladeers, puppets, storybook costumed characters, and much much more!

Her love of stories and culture set her on a path to listen and learn and share the stories---to give people a clearer understanding of the often misunderstood, often invisible, cultures of the First Nations of North America. The product of a mixed background that is urban Chicago and rural Texas, Internet and ancient teachers, elders teachings and university classrooms Dovie began telling stories publicly while teaching literature and writing at an urban high school in Cleveland. So, she began telling those first-heard old Indian stories—stories about making choices—stories that could become a blueprint for a personal value system. In the twenty years since then, she has shared stories throughout North America and overseas:with NASA and Indian Education programs on reservations, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and the National Geographic Society, NPR's Living on Earth and the BBC's My Century, cross-community programs in Northern Ireland, powwows, conferences, schools and libraries from Belgium to California.   Continued »