Bio
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BRIEF BIO
Moth Story Slam Champion and author, Rachel R. Pollock weaves irreverence, wit, and deep compassion into captivating personal stories that explore the complexities of modern American identity.
TELLER
Rachel made her "official" festival storytelling debut at the April, 2025 Stone Soup Storytelling Festival in Woodruff, South Carolina where she served as an opening teller for festival headliner Kim Weitkamp, who was also her storytelling mentor through the 2024-2025 Ohio Arts Council's Traditional Arts Apprenticeship program. Pollock's featured teller performance as "New Voice" and M.C. of the Kentucky Dream Festival in October, 2025 merited her nomination for the National Storytelling Festival Exchange Place Stage. Pollock became a Moth Story Slam Champion in March of 2026. That same year, she launched her storytelling tour "Don't Run Wild", a uniquely humorous storytelling show (45 minutes) based on personal and family stories drawn from her memoir Journey to Long Nose, which she continues to present at multiple spoken word venues in the U.S. and abroad.
FOLKLIFE RESEARCHER
R. R. Pollock (Rachel Rebecca Pollock) folklife storyteller and researcher, works as writer, teacher and performer. After publishing and “sealing” her first book of published poetry Closing Pandora’s Box (Topsail Press, Akron, 2002), she directed her attention to teaching and coaching stories. Pollock’s Storytelling Workshop (2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009) published multiple times in pedagogical journals, draws on the changing nature of personal identity to create new stories. Research grants to study “chaos narrative” (Wounded Storyteller, A. Frank) informed Pollock’s groundbreaking work in StoryCorps at the U.S. Library of Congress American Folklife Center that culminated in her first full-length play on mediated Deaf Culture in America, Is: Listening On the Edge of Deaf America (2007) and garnered international interest from the BBC.
AUTHOR
Her short play Remember How He Told You was published through a trust by the Ohio Muskingum Valley Presbytery. In 2022, her short story Exit Wound was one of thirteen stories chosen from 13,000 international entries to be published in the first Vocal Media anthology out of the UK. Pollock’s one-woman show Journey To Long Nose premiered nationally July, 2019 in Washington, D.C. at the Capital Fringe Festival and internationally July, 2024 in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe. In 2025, R.R. Pollock independently published her full-length memoir Journey to Long Nose: An American Identity Outing with BigFish Folklife.
R.R. Pollock (rachel rebecca pollock)
folk artist, schoolmarm & speech coach, poet,
pastor’s wife, mom, writer,
fringe performer
Storyteller