The Monti -- Durham Chapel Hill storytelling

Inaugural Event: April 22nd, 7:30pm, Spice Street Chapel Hill

Ron Jones likes to tell people that he grew up on a North Carolina dairy farm in a whole family of storytellers. Living in a large family of six children, parents, grandmothers, and extended family members- aunts, uncle, cousins- there was always time for a story and a willing teller. Among his earliest memories are gatherings on the front porch or in the yard under sprawling oak trees listening to his grandmother tell stories. Even when working around the farm Ron said you might get an impromptu story from an idle farmhand while sitting on the fence waiting for the cows to amble into the milk barn. So he feels that he comes to his love for storytelling honestly.

Ron has been sharing stories and songs with audiences of all ages for more than thirty years. In schools, libraries, and at storytelling festivals throughout the east coast, Canada and Mexico, he tells traditional and contemporary folktales, classic fairy tales, bi-lingual stories, as well as original stories and songs. He often involves the audience in participation stories and sing-a-longs. Ron believes strongly in the rich oral tradition of storytelling and the common experience it brings to us all.

With an under graduate degree in theater, Ron spent several years as an actor touring with educational theater companies. After receiving a Masters Degree in Library Science, he spent over twenty-two years with the Wake County Public Library System in Raleigh, NC as a librarian and as Coordinator of Youth Services. During his time with the public library he developed storytelling programs for children of all ages, founded and coordinated one of the longest running storytelling festivals in NC, and conducted storytelling workshops, as well as teaching storytelling at Meredith College in Raleigh. Upon leaving Wake County Ron served as the Youth Services Consultant for the State Library of North Carolina in the Department of Cultural Resources. During that time he worked with libraries, schools, and other organizations throughout the state to develop and improve library programs and services to the youth of North Carolina. Ron retired from the State Library in 2000 to pursue storytelling and writing full time. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the NC Public Library Director’s Association, the 2000 Emerging Artist Award by the Durham Arts Council, and he was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine by former NC Governor James B. Hunt, III.

Ron has been an active member of the local, state, and national storytelling communities. As a founding board member and past president of the North Carolina Storytelling Guild, he worked closely with other storytellers throughout the state to promote and support storytellers and the art of storytelling. He served for five years as the NC Liaison to the National Storytelling Network in Jonesborough, TN.

Ron is currently touring STORIES BY THE BOOK a program for adults with eight original stories focusing on the power and impact books and reading can have on our lives. Last year Ron released his first CD of stories and songs for children entitled I’d Rather Be a Dog…and Other Stories. His newest CD Do Tell…Cabin Tales from the Mountainside! has just been released. He continues to write and perform at festivals, libraries and conferences throughout the country.

Tanya Olson lives in Durham and teaches at Vance-Granville Community College. She holds the M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College, Dublin and the Ph.D. in 20th Century British Literature from UNC-Greensboro. Her work has been published in, among other places, Cairn, Bad Subjects, Main Street Rag, Pedestal Magazine, Elysian Fields, and Southern Cultures. She won first place in the 2005 Independent Poetry contest and reads often in the area, including at the Carrboro Poetry Festival and the Wave Books Poetry Bus tour. She helps co-ordinate Durham’s Third Friday, is a member of the Black Socks poetry group, and serves on the board of the Carolina Wren Press.

Randall Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits was published by Grove Press in 1989; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace. That collection was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. He is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999, and was nominated for the Southern Book Award. His latest book, The Fire This Time, was published in May 2007. He is currently working on a novel, There’s A Man Going Round Taking Names, set in North Carolina and New York City; and a book about the North Carolina hog industry.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1963, and spent his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a B.A. in English in 1985. From 1985 to 1989 he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, publishers. In 1989 he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. He was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in the fall of 1994, and the Edourd Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating Writing at his alma mater in 1995. He was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford (1997-98),Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and held the Lehman-Brady Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has also taught urban literature at Vassar College.

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Currently he is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Jeff Polish is new to the Triangle area having moved here nine months ago from St. Louis, MO. Jeff has spent most of his adult life at a research bench in a genetics lab while earning a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis; after which time, he decided to pursue his passion by teaching high school biology. This fall, Jeff will begin teaching at Cary Academy. Jeff started The Monti because he loves hearing great stories from interesting people and would like to bring this love to a wide audience. He lives in Chapel Hill with his wife, Allison, and son, Jackson.

Frank Stasio Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.

From there he went to National Public Radio, where he rose from associate producer to newscaster for All Things Considered. He left that job in 1990 to help start an alternative school in Washington, DC. Frank returned to NPR as a freelance news anchor, guest host of Talk of The Nation and other national programs, and host of special news coverage.

He also presents audio theater workshops for children and teachers and conducts radio journalism workshops for broadcasters in former Soviet-bloc countries. He lives in Durham.

Marcy Smith is the literary editor and crafts columnist at The News & Observer. She is the author of a critical biography of satirist Dawn Powell and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crochet Projects. Her son, daughter and an odd little dog keep her fueled with stories. She lives in Cary -- in a house equipped with a crank-operated pencil sharpener — with her husband, intrepid outdoors writer Joe Miller.