About Me

Who I Am

Jules Corriere writes and directs a monthly, one-hour radio show, “A Night with the Yarn Exchange,” now in its eighth season, based on oral stories from the region, which performs at the International Storytelling Center and is broadcast on local NPR station 89.5 FM and streams worldwide. In addition to her radio work, Corriere has been a playwright and theater director with Community Performance, International for over twenty years. This theatrical work is steeped in local culture, and developed with oral stories and histories to develop creative nonfiction scripts that are performed by 40-70 community members of all ages and backgrounds as a way to bring people together across barriers of age, culture, religion and other obstacles that keep communities from being strong neighbors. She wrote her first play, Story Lines, in 2000, based in Newport News, Virginia, and recently completed writing The Long Trip Home, set to premier in Jonesborough, Tennessee in February 2019, the “Storytelling Capital of the World.” Her work Let My People Go! A Spiritual Journey, written with composer Donald McCullough and Denny Clarke, performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  She received the Presidential Points of Light Award for The Whole World Gets Well in Chicago. Her work has toured internationally in England, Scotland, and Brazil. She served for five years as co-artistic director and playwright for Georgia’s Official Folk Life Play, Swamp Gravy, and her play Turn the Washpot Down became the official Folk-Life Play for the state of South Carolina. She has appeared in Who’s Who for her work in theater arts and social activism for the past decade. Since moving to Jonesborough, Tennessee nearly six years ago, she has written seventy-eight episodes of her one-hour radio show, A Night with the Yarn Exchange. Her body of work encompasses a passion for bringing to life the extraordinary stories of ordinary people as a way to build community.