Debut presents: Up Close and Personal Coaching with Kevin Cordi and Antonio Rocha and Simon Brooks!

Debut presents: Up Close and Personal Coaching with Dr. Kevin Cordi and Antonio Rocha along with Simon Brooks. 

Have you ever wondered about ins and outs of coaching?  We invite you go 'Up Close and Personal' as two well-known Storytelling Coaches will have a Dive in, up close and personal about the art and practice of coaching.

After the interview, join us as we coach Storytellers who have applied to be coached.  They will tell an eight to ten minute story and you will see these coaches in session with the selected tellers.  More Surprises will be announced. 

Afterwards, with Simon and the attendees, we will engage in a talk back about the Coaching Process.

Our goal is to share by example and by our rich discussion, coaching strategies that you can use in your own telling development.   Whether you are just starting out in using story or are an experienced, teller, we aim for everyone to learn skills and coaching habits that will help you.

A Little Bit About The Coaches

Simon Brooks is not only a national teller, but he is an experienced coach as well.  He draws on his rich experience as he moderates the rich conversations that come from coaching. 

Since 1991, British storyteller, humorist and raconteur Simon Brooks has been telling to audiences from all over the world. Simon became a full-time, professional storyteller in 2003, released his first CD in 2006, and his first collection of folk and fairy tales in 2018. Simon has won awards and honors for his storytelling albums from Storytelling World and Parent's Choice. Simon travels all over New England and to other parts of the USA, and has told his tales in Europe. He presents anywhere you want him, be it a school, college, library, festival, camp, hospital, business, restaurant, coffee house or home.

Antonio Rocha, a native of Brazil, began his career in the performing arts in 1985. In 1988 he received a Partners of the Americas grant to come to the USA to perform and deepen his mime skills with Mime Master Tony Montanaro. Since then he has earned a Summa Cum Laude Theater BA from USM (University of Southern Maine) and studied with Master Marcel Marceau. Mr. Rocha’s unique fusion of mime and spoken word has been performed from Singapore to South Africa and many places in between including 16 countries on 6 continents. Some of the venues include The Singapore Festival of the Arts, Wolf Trap, The National Storytelling Festival, The Kennedy Center, The Smithsonian Institution, The National Geographic, The Tales of Graz in Austria, Dunya Festival in Holland as well as many other Storytelling Festivals and educational institutions around The USA. 
Antonio has three very entertaining and educational award winning DVDs, a picture book and a few awards including the coveted Circle of Excellence Award by the National Storytelling Network.

Dr. Kevin Cordi is an American teacher, storyteller and author who has been awarded The Film Advisory Board of Excellence Award and The Storytelling World Award. He is a regular performer at national/international storytelling festivals.   Cordi started the Youth Special Interest Group for the National Storytelling Network and founded the Voices Across America Youth Storytelling Project. Cordi also wrote the book "Playing with Stories: Story crafting for storytellers, writers, teachers and other imaginative thinkers" in 2014. He is the founder of the international StoryBox Project. Since 1995, he actively sends StoryBoxes loading with stories all over the world and they travel from place to place collecting more stories. This project has been mirrored all over the country and the world. For seven years he served as the Co-director for the Columbus Area Writing Project at the Ohio State University. He is currently teaching at Ohio University in Lancaster, Ohio. He was commissioned as the first Academic Storyteller in Residence for The Ohio State University. He used stories and narrative understanding to build programs for equity and social justice with the Multicultural Center at The Ohio State University. He recently served  on the Advisory Panel for Teaching Tolerance with the Southern Law Poverty Center. He is now a Global Education Fellow with the Longview Foundation.