Featured Teller
Children’s Story Hour
Sheila Arnold has been gifted by God with performance skills; using this talent since she was eight years old. As a full-time Storyteller she travels throughout the United States sharing varying stories, as well as Historic Character Presentations. She uses story to connect with people of all kinds, from pre-school children to octogenarians, from inner city youth to suburban church members. She uses her knowledge of human development, her passion for history, her compassion for humanity and her extraordinary performance skills to craft and deliver storytelling programs that engage and entertain audiences nationally and internationally in all kinds of venues.
Willy Claflin
Featured Teller
Workshop “Out of Thin Air”
Willy Claflin became a full-time storyteller in 1984. He’s been featured eight times at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN.
This will be his 5th appearance at Sierra.
Willy lives in El Sobrante, CA, with his faithful companion Maynard Moose, renowned teller of ancient Mother Moose Tales. He and Maynard teach storytelling at Stagebridge in Oakland. He loves singing old ballads, recounting old hippy misadventures, and exploring outer space with his storytelling collaborator Dovie Thomason.
Dovie Thomason
Featured Teller
Children’s Story Hour
Dovie Thomason has been described as a river, fed by many streams: Lakota, Apache, and Scot Traveller ancestry, urban Chicago, rural Texas and international travels, the Internet and Indigenous elders, family teachings, kitchen table wisdom, and university classrooms. Drawing on those contrasts and cultures as she weaves stories old and new has made Dovie one of the most respected and admired storytellers of her generation. When she adds personal stories and untold histories, the result is a contemporary narrative of Indigeneity, history and identity told provocatively with elegance, wit, and passion.
Ivan E. Coyote
Featured Teller
Ivan E. Coyote is a writer and storyteller. Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, they are the author of thirteen books, the creator of four films, six stage shows, and three albums that combine storytelling with music. Coyote’s books have won the ReLit Award, been named a Stonewall Honour Book, been longlisted for Canada Reads, and been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize for non-fiction and the Governor General’s award for non-fiction twice. In 2017 Ivan was given an honorary Doctor of Laws from Simon Fraser University. They have toured public schools solo around the world for 19 years now, using the power of a personal story to fight bullying and make schools safer for students, staff, and parents. In 2022 Ivan will mark 28 years on the road as an international touring storyteller and musician. Coyote’s stories grapple with the complex and intensely personal topics of gender identity, family, class, and queer liberation, but always with a generous heart and a quick wit. Ivan’s stories manage to handle both the hilarious and the historical with reverence and compassion, and remind us all of our own fallible and imperfect humanity, while at the same time inspiring us to change the world.
For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events canceled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered.
Care Of, Ivan’s 13th book, released in June 2021 by McClelland and Stewart, combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work—compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.
Jasmin Cardenas
Featured Teller
Jasmin Cardenas is a proud daughter of Colombian immigrants who was born and raised in Chicago, IL. Growing up, every family gathering was filled with stories, jokes and dancing. Stories and our collective wellness matters, Jasmin uses her skills as a storyteller and theater artist to facilitate spaces of solution finding & unity.
She has been a headliner at 2023 The National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN and the 2024 Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Utah.
She received a MidAtlantic Foundation Grantee in 2022 for her one woman show DISPOSABLE, which she toured in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Her 2023 Live Album recording Cuentos from the Americas won the 2024 Storytelling World Award. The album was a labor of love and collaboration with 18 musicians and artists. Jasmin has enjoyed performing it bilingually around the country to adults and children alike.
As a co-founder of WorkersTEATRO Jasmin uses theater to advocate for workers rights along with low wage workers across the Chicagoland area. Recognized for this work by Georgetown University she was awarded a LAB Fellowship and is an active Fellow at the Laboratory of Global Performance and Politics. Jasmin is a proud SAG-AFTRA Member, stage actress and published writer.
Tim Ereneta
Guest Teller
Storyteller Tim Ereneta of Berkeley, California, connects ancient stories to modern day life, as he shares classic and forgotten fairy tales, with audiences of all ages—but especially adults. He’s told stories on stages from Washington, DC, to Chennai, India, performing in theaters, art museums, camps, churches, nightclubs, and Zoom meetings.. A former playwright and actor, Tim has been delighting audiences for more than three decades.
Past Tellers:
