Cora’s Story
Cora Newcomb turned love of the art into a storytelling career beginning in 1994.
Cora Newcomb is a professional storyteller, performing since 1994.
Her Storytelling Programs include Fun Family Stories, Legends, First-person Historic Characterization in period dress, Ghost Stories, Folk Tales, Southern Traditions, Stories for Schools, Libraries, Festivals, gatherings, civil events, Corporate Conferences, private parties.
Cora Newcomb started telling stories not as a performer but as a parent. She’d weave together tales of mothers and daughters to put her little girl to sleep at night. Always conjuring and elaborating to please her child’s imagination. She soon developed a genuine interest in storytelling as art.
She’s now a part of a storytelling revival. She’s past-president of the S.C. Storytelling Network and a founder of the Lowcountry Storytellers organization. She is a former Board Member of the Stone Soup Storytelling Institute, and served as the Southeast Regional Director of the National Storytelling Network for six years. In the beginning of her career, she participated in the inaugural Beaufort Intergalactic Storytelling Festival in Beaufort, SC.
Cora is a storyteller who is invested in telling stories. When Cora Newcomb first got serious, she ordered cassettes (remember cassettes) of popular tales from a national storytelling organization. At the time, she wasn’t even sure storytelling was a profession, much less one that required a trade group.
Really? she thought. People make a living telling stories. Newcomb, who was a professor at the College of the Lowcountry, first performed a story at the Beaufort Water Festival Talent Show. The story was about a young girl uncomfortable with her freckles, a take on a story she’d heard from another professional teller. She got a good reception, developing a taste for performing and interacting with an audience. She started performing at libraries and senior centers, birthday parties, and before she knew it, she was making money as a storyteller.
Her father joked with her saying, “I used to spank your butt for telling stories, and now people are paying you.”
As a professional storyteller, she is one of the rare few who can make you feel like you’re stepping right into the tale. She has performed across the country at many regional storytelling festivals and at national storytelling events, taught storytelling classes, and helped families shape their own histories into stories worth preserving. She’s traveled to China to exchange storytelling traditions with Chinese performers.
Her education includes an MS in education from Temple University, plus postgraduate work in educational psychology and higher education leadership. She has earned many accolades, but beyond honors, her real legacy is how she’s lived: with curiosity, courage, and a deep sense of adventure.
She’s lived on a three-masted ship in the Puget Sound, spent a winter in a log cabin in Northern Idaho with no electricity or running water (a two-seater out back), ridden the Bicentennial Wagon Train, hunted cottonmouth snakes in the Everglades, toured Mexico on a Harley, driven an 18-wheeler, climbed the three tallest mountains on the East Coast, seen the northern lights with her own eyes – and given the world a daughter as wild and wonderful as any of her adventures.
In addition, Cora recently co-authored a book: Greer, Armed and Dangerous — a vivid, first-person look into small-town law enforcement across several decades in Greer, South Carolina.
If you have ever heard Cora in person, you know she doesn’t just tell stories; she paints them.
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