At the Kearney Area Storytelling Festival, professional storytellers—along with area tellers—present the art of storytelling in many area venues.

Paul Strickland and Lyn Ford will present Stories for All Ages on February 3 and 7.

Tuesday, February 3

Paul Strickland – Stories for All Ages
5:00 pm | Calvin T. Ryan Library-UNK
2508 11th Ave, Kearney, NE

Lyn Ford – Stories for All Ages
7:00 pm | Kearney Public Library
2020 1st Ave, Kearney, NE

Saturday, February 7

Paul Strickland and Lyn Ford – Stories for All Ages
with Local Teller Janice Polk
1:00 pm | Kearney Public Library
2020 1st Ave, Kearney, NE

Lyn Ford and Paul Strickland – Stories for All Ages
with Local Teller Rick Brown
3:00 pm | Kearney Public Library
2020 1st Ave, Kearney, NE

Please visit the Kearney Area Storytelling Festival website for the full range of events in Kearney.

Lynette (Lyn) Ford, an American storyteller, teaching artist, author and creative narrative workshop presenter was the first storyteller in the state of Ohio to be nominated for a Governor’s Award for the Arts. She is a regular performer at regional and national storytelling festivals and conferences, including the National Storytelling Festival, Hawaii’s Talk Story Festival and the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival. Lyn has also shared keynote presentations, performances and workshops in Australia and Ireland, and for the Transformative Language Arts Network’s and Ohio Literacy Resource Center’s annual conferences and events. Lyn is a two-time recipient of the National Storytelling Network’s ORACLE award, receiving both its Leadership and Service and Circle of Excellence awards. Lyn is a member of the National Association of Black Storytellers Circle of Elders. Lyn’s first publications as an individual author are Affrilachian Tales and Beyond the Briar Patch. Both books are compilations of stories from Lyn’s childhood memories, enriched with information on Affrilachian culture. She has written several other books alone and has been a co-author on other books.

Paul Strickland is a professional storyteller and theatre artist from Kentucky. He has a large repertoire of unique family friendly stories, including reupholstered folk tales, fairytales for adults and future adults, tall-tales and even historical stories that just happened to have never happened. Paul was a Teller-in-Residence at the International Storytelling Center in 2024. He was a Featured Teller: New Voice at the National Storytelling Festival in September of 2023. He was a Featured Teller at Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in September 2023, Cave Run Storytelling Festival in 2022 and many other major storytelling festivals. In November of 2018 he made his NYC stage debut Off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse with his shadow and flashlight ghost story play, “13 Dead Dream of Eugene.” Always adapting to whatever audience is in front of him, Paul loves telling stories in every imaginable environment, from comedy clubs to elementary and middle schools, corporate events and even two prisons – where he was NOT an inmate at the time. Collections of his stories have won “Best of Fest” honors more than 18 times at Fringe Theatre Festivals in the US and Canada. Selections from his comedy performance “Levels of Difficulty” are still played nearly every day on Sirius XM radio.