2025 Conference Schedule

Stories that Leaders (Need to) Tell - by Jeff Hannah

In this workshop, business owners and business leaders will find and craft their own stories that build business relationships, strengthen culture and facilitate change. Stories That Leaders (Need to) Tell emphasizes the foundations of organizational storytelling: the science of stories, signature stories – including origin stories -- and effective speaking techniques.

Bio: As a certified storyteller and leadership expert, Jeff Hannah draws upon 15+ years’ experience developing and delivering leadership training and coaching for business owners, executives and senior leaders, and front-line management. Jeff teaches leaders how to transform organizations through stories – stories that facilitate change, reinforce culture and build relationships. His workshops emphasize the foundations of organizational storytelling, including purposeful signature stories and effective presentation and speaking techniques.

Balloons, Bandannas and Bare-Hand Puppetry: Activating Stories with Simple Stuff - by Barry Stewart Mann

Let’s have fun exploring how to use simple, lightweight, inexpensive, colorful, dynamic, readily-accessible and easy-to-transport items to bring stories to life.  In this hands-on workshop for tellers, educators, librarians, and parents, we’ll share tried-and-true approaches and brainstorm more possibilities.  All supplies provided – you bring creativity and a willingness to play.

Bio: Barry Stewart Mann is an Atlanta-based storyteller, actor, and arts educator who specializes in bringing theme-based programs to schools and libraries.  He has toured English-language story programs to dual-immersion schools in foreign cities, including Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Beijing.  He has been a teller and workshop presenter at the Chennai Storytelling Festival for 8 years, and in 2024 traveled on a Fulbright to share storytelling and drama integration strategies across southern India.  Currently, Barry and partner Deborah Strahorn offer “The Strange Case of Lady Liberty,” an eye-opening historical investigation through story about the racial roots of the iconic monument.

Find your story, Find your voice – by Mark Lamb

In this workshop we will explore ways to tell your story authentically through writing exercises, improvisation, and performance exercises. Our goals will be to find new paths into sharing our stories that could be useful for everything, from corporate presentations, to sharing stories with family, or perhaps entering a storytelling competition?

Bio: Mark Lamb is an award-winning storyteller whose captivating performances explore love, loss, identity, family, and life’s unexpected moments. A Moth GrandSLAM winner, National Storytelling Festival Slam winner, featured on NPR, The Moth podcast and PBS’s Stories from the Stage. A Kentucky native, Mark draws inspiration from his family’s rich storytelling traditions and his experiences as a queer artist from the South. He is also a distinguished choreographer and dance educator. As artistic director of Mark Lamb Dance, his innovative work blending movement and narrative has been praised by The New York Times as “quietly celebratory” and an “expression of communal joy.”

Sing a Story, Tell a Song -  by Fran Stallings 

You don't have to be a musician to add lively rhythm, sound effects, and lyrical depth to your stories. Learn what kinds of stories beg for the addition of a song, how to find and compose lyrics and melodies, then help set a story you already know into song. 

Bio: Fran Stallings (Bartlesville OK) teaches and tells traditional tales and original creations nationwide and overseas. A singer/songwriter, she has used songs in her performances since 1985, recording covers and original songs on 4 CDs. She has published stories, articles, and award-winning books. She plays autoharp with the contra-band Silver Dollar Strings.

AI and Storytelling: Friend or Foe? - by Judy Baker

AI is everywhere.  Can storytelling and Artificial Intelligence co-exist?  Does AI quash creativity or can it be used as a tool to enhance the creative process?  Can we use AI judiciously, or should it be relegated to the trash bin?  Come explore with us!

Bio: Growing up in a town with only one piano teacher meant that Judy would be unable to fulfill her fondest childhood dream:  to be able to carry those big music books and walk down the hill from the elementary school to the little brown house where the piano teacher lived. Music would not be her muse, but she found her voice in storytelling.  She serves as program chair for the Cleveland Storytelling Guild and has told and presented workshops at festivals, schools, libraries and churches regionally.  

KSA Member Mini-Grants -- a KSA Member Benefit -  by Mary Hamilton

The KSA Member Mini-grant is a benefit of your KSA Membership. Find out how the mini-grant program works, brainstorm ideas for a mini-grant funded project, and develop a rough draft of a potential mini-grant application.

Bio: Mary Hamilton, KSA Secretary, has served on the KSA mini-grant committee off and on for several years. She has been awarded one KSA mini-grant. She has written grant applications successfully securing several grants for KSA from the Kentucky Arts Council. For a Frankfort organization, she won a grant from Kentucky Humanities. For her own professional work, she has won grants from the KY Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She has also served on grant review panels for the Kentucky Arts Council. Mary understands both the fundamentals of grant-writing and the particulars of the KSA mini-grant program.

Native American Stories: Differences between Indigenous and Western Storytelling – by Augustin Jorquez

This workshop will highlight various styles, interpretations, cadences, and participation of Native American storytelling. A few of the stories have never been published while others may be recognized. Brief discussions may be made before, in between, and after each story.

Presented by a lifetime learner and story keeper.

Bio: Greetings, my name is Augustin Jorquez, my Tribal affiliation on Patriarchal side is Apache (NN’Nee); Matriarchal side is Sonoran Yaqui (Yoeme); newly residing in New

Haven, KY. National speaker on bringing greater awareness toward Native American issues. For over 40 years shared Native American stories to non-profits, schools, churches, and events. He had won awards and honorable mentions for research on medicinal herbs of the Southwest. Continues gathering further knowledge of indigenous traditional healing

rituals and stories. Lifelong learner of healing methods including storytelling for mind, body, and spirit.

Tech(nique) Up Your Storytelling! -  by Don Ray Smith

An interactive experience with humorist Don Ray Smith showing how various presentation techniques such as Eye Contact, Pauses, Voice Inflection, Facial Expression, Body Language and Sound Effects and more can give your stories more energy and believability.

Bio: Don Ray Smith is a Louisville native. He has worked as a humor writer, a newspaper reporter, a tour guide, a stand-up storyteller, a pickle-weigher, an actor, and a public relations man. But not in that order. 

His features, essays and sketches have appeared in Louisville Magazine, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Business First newspaper, LEO, African American Journal, Kentucky Living magazine, The Lane Report, and other regional publications. He has also published three books, including Racebook (a rom/com novel), plus three collections of short humor, Feel My Humerus and Kentucky Shorts and the upcoming The Best He Could Do.

Don also performs his one-man play, ‘Growing Up White on Wilson,’ his true story about growing up in the segregated West End of Louisville in the 1950s and 60s. The play shows how racism is taught, passed on and eventually overcome. It has been performed at the Russell Theater, Roots-101 African American Museum, Jefferson Community & Technical College and other venues.

Don’s stories are all original, written by him, and veer from hilarious to nostalgic, poignant to poetic!