storyworksgroup: A Festival of Family Fun

We had good crowds under the
Storytelling Tent.

The 2012 Tucson Festival of Books was even better than last year! This says a lot about how the our community supports and values stories, reading, books, authors and learning. I am proud to be a small part of an event that brings an estimated 115,000 people together in southern Arizona for a two day celebration of literacy. Tucson launched this festival in 2009, and it now ranks fourth on the list of five top book festivals in the United States, just behind the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

NAU Peaks Players in " Josefina Javalina"

As a coordinator for the storytelling stage during the festival, I was delighted with our line up of excellent storytellers - each one sharing a different set of tales and performance styles. The diverse family audiences drawn to our large tent in the children's area on the University of Arizona Mall had a grand time!

Jean Baxter, co-cordinaor
of the Storytelling Stage

Fran Stallings, Author and Storyteller

In the previous post, I listed

the talented storytellers

featured on Saturday.

Our storytellers on

Sunday got off to a great

start with stories by

by Fran Stallings.

Other artists on the Sunday stage included Conrad J. Storad, Susan Lowell and the NAU Peaks Players, Loren R. Russell, Jean Baxter, Anne Lee, Ron Lancaster and yours truly.

The festival is over now, and plans for the next one are already underway. I wonder if 2013 will exceed the number of authors (450) and attendees (approximately 115,000) we had this year.