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Featured Tellers
Charlotte Blake Alston
Charlotte Blake Alston breathes life into traditional and contemporary stories from African and African American oral and cultural traditions. Her solo performances are often enhanced with traditional instruments such as djembe, mbira, shekere or the 21-stringed kora. Her repertoire is wide and programs are adapted to any grade level or age group.
Charlotte is a nationally acclaimed storyteller, narrator, instrumentalist, librettist and singer who performs in venues throughout North America and abroad. She is the host of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s preschool concert series, Sound All Around, and has appeared as host and narrator on the orchestra’s school and family concerts since 1991. She has made multiple appearances in such venues as the Smithsonian Institution, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Storytelling Festival and the National Festival of Black Storytelling. Her international appearances include performances or festival appearances in Accra, Ghana; Cape Town, South Africa; Beijing, China; Basel, Switzerland and the Cape Clear Island Storytelling Festival in Ireland.
She has been a narrator for choirs and orchestras around the country including the Detroit Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. In 2021, Charlotte made her opera debut as a narrator in the Philadelphia Opera’s production of Tosca. She has received numerous honors and awards including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Artist of the Year Award, the National Storytelling Network’s Circle of Excellence Award and the Zora Neale Hurston Award, the highest award given by the National Association of Black Storytellers.
Charlotte Blake Alston
https://www.charlotteblakealston.com/
Phone: 610-259-1135
Email: griotwoman@aol.com
For Bookings: Siegel Artist Management
Charmaine Crowell-White
Charmaine is a graduate of San Jose State University in San Jose, California and has performed and directed for many theater companies across the United States. Her extensive film credits include, Peggy Sue Got Married, Major Payne, Hannibal, Thomas Jefferson, An American Scandal, a worshiper in the PBS mini-series the Abolitionists, the role of Minerva in The Spielberg Lincoln Film, a free slave woman in Killing Lincoln, and a laundry servant in the AMC television series Turn. Charmaine was a background player in a pilot episode in The Kevin Durant T.V. Series. She also played several background roles in Ethan Hawke's Showtime series Good Lord Bird.
Her extensive theater credits include major roles in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, God’s Trombones, A Raisin In The Sun, Home, Death and the Maiden, North Star, and the list goes on.
Charmaine is a living History Interpreter. Her presentations celebrate the lives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Sukey, Dolly Madison’s personal servant. As a modern day griot, she tells stories and dramatizes tales from various African tribes.
Stan Trent
“I can’t wait to hear more of Professor Trent’s stories! I am taken aback and touched by his storytelling and hearing first-hand about his experiences from childhood to now.” For over 30 years Stanley has received comments like this from students taking his teacher education courses at the University of Virginia. They have inspired him to share those stories more broadly. Stanley will always be a teacher at heart, and as he moves toward retirement, he looks forward to sharing his stories to larger audiences across the country and perhaps the world.
Many of his stories come from chapters of a memoir he’s writing. These stories are culled from a journal his students gave him for his birthday in 1982. He wrote about the joys of waking up and learning that schools were closed because of snow, confiscating Rubik's cubes, and Game Boys, and teaching the three R’s using story lines from E.T. and Star Wars. In 1992, after filling the pages of his hard copy from beginning to end, he began recounting his stories on his computer. Since that time, he has written thousands of pages filled with stories about his personal life including his family history, loss and birth of loved ones, faith, failure and success, dreams that became realities, and struggles that led to growth and transformation.
His storytelling has been influenced by relatives like his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and especially his 98-year-old mother who still tells him stories about his great grandfather who was a slave, her childhood sweetheart who later became his dad, his dad twice asking her father for her hand in marriage, how his dad’s best man got lost driving them to the justice of the peace for the wedding ceremony, and how he carried her across the threshold of the house he built for her as her wedding present.
Stanley has received awards for his memoir work including the Linda Julian Award for Creative Non-fiction, the notable list for The Best Essays for 2020, and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. In his spare time, he piddles on his piano, reads novels and memoirs, meditates, and works out at the gym more in January than any other month of the year. He is excited about this next chapter of his life—sharing stories to inspire growth and self-actualization.
Rob Craighurst
Rob’s been delighting audiences for over 20 years with stories that are goofy, serious, or both.After attending his first National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, TN in 1976, Rob was hooked. But he wasn’t a natural-born storyteller. “I couldn’t tell a joke to save my soul.” So he wondered why he liked the great stories so much. What were those storytellers doing? The answer brought him to become what one listener exclaimed “a wicked-good storyteller.”
When he’s not telling stories, Rob is sharing his life in Charlottesville with his wife, daughter, and three cats, contra dancing, renovating a house, developing his portrait photography skills, and being a landlord. “My job is to keep people and property happy."
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