Le Cercle Fran�ais, the French club of CSU Fresno, along with L'Alliance Fran�aise of Fresno, are happy to host this Franco-American storyteller during his California visit to the Mariposa Storytelling Festival.

Michael Parent, a native Mainer of French-Canadian descent, has performed as a storyteller and singer, in both English and French, throughout  the United States and beyond since 1977. He has been featured at many storytelling events, including hundreds of schools and libraries, the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, the International Storytelling Colloquium in Paris, the "Long Night of Storytelling" festival-tour of Austria, the Glistening Waters Festival in New Zealand, the Sperrins Autumn Storytelling Festival in Northern Ireland and the Scealta Shamhna Festival in Dublin, and the Eugene (Oregon) Multicultural Storytelling Festival, and more. He also leads storytelling, storywriting, and performance workshops, and is a 1999 recipient of National Storytelling Network's Circle of Excellence Award. He was also a keynote speaker at the National Storytelling Conference in Providence, R.I. in 2001. After living in Virginia for many years, Michael returned to his home state of Maine in July of 1998, and now lives in Portland.

For more information about Michael Parent, visit his webpage: http://www.michaelparentstorytelling.com/