Retiring the Champ

Watch a Video Clip

About This Story l Bringing this Story to Your Conference or Community l
What People Are Saying l About Judith Black

About Judith Black
Judith Black is one of the nation's premier storytellers. She has just been informed that this summer she'll receive the Circle of Excellence Award, the most prestigious national storytelling honor conferred. These awards are given to artists who are recognized by their peers to be master storytellers who set the standards for excellence and have demonstrated, over a significant period of time, a commitment and dedication to the art of storytelling.

The Boston Globe says of one of her performances, "Black has culled the minefields of childhood and elevated them through her storytelling to a level of universal experience that is not only painful and poignant, but gut-wrenchingly hilarious." Judith's stories include explorations into the mythic and dissections of the minuscule, with traditional and original material available for all age groupings. She has been commissioned by the US Department of the Interior, NPR, The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and others to create original stories out of authentic times and characters in our national history. Well known for stories sculpted from her own observed life, subjects such as patient (or the attempt at it) parenting, disasters in dating land, and now helping elders through their last journey, are no strangers to her repertoire. As a post feminist, vegetarian, pacifist, her son's path through the ranks of football playing and into the US Marines has been the source of much comedy and a template for human growth and development. One of these tales appears in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and many of them are on her recordings.