Announcing: A Taste of Appalachia in Atlanta, GA 2025

The A Taste of Appalachia Festival Concert presented by the Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellows awarded in 2024. Featuring Omope Carter-Daboiku, Janice Lynn Cooley, Felecia Outsey and Dynamic Ray, Eric Monstalung Jordan, and Beverly Fields Burnett. 

A Taste of Appalachia Concert Featured on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, 10:30 am at the Embassy Suites at Centennial Park in Atlanta GA.

The National Association of Black Storytellers is a unique gathering of artists. Its mission is to build and grow the living cultural expressions held in story. Every year the festival is an explosion of color, fashion, laughter, light, and love. From Regalia to the latest African fashions, artists come to share their wares so that storytellers can blend them into their storytelling. It gives an authentic voice to the way they enrich and enliven the tales they tell of people here and around the world. The concerts at the festival are meant to represent the best there is in the growing edge of storytelling and traditional tales.

Members of NABS vary from those on the professional concert stage to porch tellers who share stories and histories from our journey in this land and the many lands we have had to travel to make and keep our freedom, our voice, our song and our music. 

The vision of Mother Mary Carter Smith and Mama Linda Goss in 1982, was to make a repository of Black culture preserved through the stories of its people. It was meant to make a place where Blackfolks spoke for themselves, with their own words, their story, their truth, their wisdom and an authentic rendering of the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual life of Black people.

The festival is the culmination of a year of growing the deepening of our culture through developing stories, old and new. Members have spent the year in research, restoring memories, delving into archives, memorizing rhythms, rhymes, songs, poems, and oral histories gathered, curating libraries, books written, papers presented. 

Our fellows are great example of that and share a familial legacy with their local communities as well as the greater regions of Appalachia and beyond. 

What are the featured tellers telling?

Thursday, November 20, 2025

• Omope Carter-Daboiku will be sharing family stories: The Story of Life
• Janice Lynn Cooley will portray of Nancy Perkins, the subject of her new book called Seeds for Life in Appalachia: The Culinary Journey of African American Families 
• Eric Jordan will be sharing excerpts from his new book: Child of the Poet, Son of the Dreamer, about growing up with his famous and fabulous father, Norman Jordan
• Beverly Fields Burnett: Family Stories from the Hearth
• Felecia Outsey: a New Contemporary version of the Little Red Hen

Friday, November 21, 2025

• Jim Embry will be presenting a workshop on Friday called Joy and Justice: Journeys to a Sustainable Future from 11-12 noon. 
• 2023 Fellow, Kelle Jolly, will be sharing a workshop on Friday on Appalachian Blues Women: Wild Women Give Us the Blues from 9:00 – 10:00 am

Admission to the festival and concerts are available on site and the day of the events. Click here for all of the event details!

Interested in attending or becoming a member of NABS? Click here!