Circus Rex

Loren Niemi has spent forty-five years as a professional storyteller creating, collecting, performing, teaching and writing about what it means to be human. He has served as the Humanities Scholar in Residence for Northern Minnesota, been the ringmaster and tour manager of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theatre's Circle of Water Circus, and spent twenty-five years performing with Kevin Kling and Michael Sommers in the iconic performance art trio "Bad Jazz." In 2016 he received the National Storytelling Network's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, he founded the American School of Storytelling, providing online classes in traditional, personal and applied storytelling narratives and in-person oral narrative workshops and performances.He is the co-author, with Elizabeth Ellis, of the critically acclaimed Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories on the value and necessity of the stories that are hard to hear and harder to tell and the author of two award-winning books on crafting narrative: The New Book of Plots, and Point of View and the Emotional Arc of Stories which he co-authored with Nancy Donoval. His collection of non-traditional "ghost" stories, What Haunts Us, won a 2020 Midwest Book Award for Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy/Paranormal fiction. His most recent book, A Breviary for the Lost, a poetic memoir of his seven years in a Catholic religious order.Loren has a BA in Philosophy and Studio Arts from St. Mary's University, Winona, Minnesota, and a MA in Liberal Studies/American Culture from Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota. He taught storytelling for twenty-six years in the Communications and Theater Programs of Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota, and at workshops across the country.