Congratulations to Brad Jennings, who won our first-ever Grand Slam. Brad competed with all the other winners from this year's monthly open mic story slams and earned the title of Best Storyteller in York. The theme for the evening was FULL CIRCLE, and we hosted the event in the Capitol Theatre in downtown York.

Brad (not Bradley, aka Brian) is pictured here with our Master of Ceremonies, Aaron Lewis, York Story Slam producer JJ Sheffer, and the badass trophy he won with his story about his poor choice of underwear as a high school athlete.

Watch all the videos from the Grand Slam here.

We thank the Strand Capitol Performing Arts Center for allowing us to host this event in the beautiful Capitol Theatre. We appreciate the support this year from The Beer Ace, who underwrote some of our expenses so that we could keep our ticket prices low. We were also fortunate to be the recipient of a Creative Impact Award from the Cultural Alliance of York County; that grant helped fund our startup expenses.

We are grateful to work with an excellent team of vendors to produce our events and archive the stories: photographers Isaac Edmondson Photography, Digital Ephemera Photography, and Jeff Lautenberger; sound guy/audio engineer extraordinaire Logan Summey of Third Leg Audio; York Storyman Randy Flaum, who records and produces our videos; and Carla at Wilson Media Services, who produces our monthly podcast (click on PODCAST at the top of the page!).

Thank you to everyone who showed up this year to listen, and everyone who bravely put their names into the hat to share stories. Storytelling is a wonderful way to get to know others in your community; to uncover things you have in common with your neighbors, and to recognize and understand our differences. This is always a valuable opportunity, and it seems especially important in times like these.

We won’t have a story slam event in December – we'll be busy planning for next year. We will continue to host our monthly events on the third Tuesday of the month in 2017. Please block it out on your calendar and make sure you’re on our email list and following us on social media so we can keep you in the loop when we announce the themes for next year.