Now available: 2024 Black History Month package:
• 45-60 minute events for all ages/schools/libraries/private/corporate
• Combines original stories rooted in Anita’s southwest Georgia upbringing, and folk tales from various world cultures, especially West African.
• For age appropriate audiences Anita includes, “Piggly Wiggly”, her telling version from Chapter 1 from her debut novel, The Peach Seed, with colorful backstories of her writing process and her road to publication.
Contact Anita for package pricing from $200-$300 based on location.
Her February tour dates are:
New York City: February 10-16
Metro Atlanta: February 17 -19
Southwest Georgia/Savannah: February 20-26
Since the early 1990s, Anita has brought oral tradition storytelling to audiences across the country, pulling from global folklore as well as original and personal stories from her southwest Georgia upbringing. Anita has told stories at corporate, public and private events: camps, festivals, libraries, schools (assemblies / classrooms /workshops) or wherever well-meaning folk gather to listen. Her stories come from a place of respect and community to fit any occasion: wherever people gather to listen with open minds and hearts.
At long last, in this age of technology and information, there is solid science to back up what any griot [pronounced: GREE-o], folklorist and oral tradition storyteller has known since Homo erectus learned to point and grunt: stories *(some say even more than opposable thumbs) make us human. Our ability to imagine, to transform what we know into “what if” means we can invent a possible future and thereby prepare for it. This sets us apart from all other species.
Whether you engage as a listener, viewer or reader, stories expand our human experience and—in the end—connect us.
Opposable thumbs let us hang on: story told us what to hang on to…the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.
*Lisa Cron from her book, Wired for Story
With over twenty-five years of experience as a professional oral tradition storyteller, Anita has brought stories to audiences across the country, pulling from global folklore as well as original and personal stories from her southwest Georgia upbringing. She turns this craft to the page in short stories, children’s stories and her debut novel, The Peach Seed, a Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and selected for ELLE’s 65 Of The Best And Most Anticipated Books of 2023. Acquired by Retha Powers of Holt & Company in a two-book deal. Published on August 1, 2023. Hardcover, Ebook and Audiobook (narrated by Anita) available wherever books are sold.