Additional Performers
Tabitha Enoch
Mistress of Ceremonies
Tabitha Enoch grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and moved to Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999 to assume the role of Assistant Dean in Residence Life here at UVA. In 2002, her area of responsibility shifted from Residence Life to Orientation and New Student Programs (ONSP) where her team works to build an inclusive and welcoming experience for new undergraduates with a wonderful squad of student leaders. The orientation program provides incoming students with services that enable them to transition smoothly into their new roles at the University. The following annual programs reflect some of the other work that ONSP does: Summer Orientation, Wahoo Welcome, Opening Convocation and Honor Induction, Grounds for Discussion (a peer-theater production), Transfer Student Programming, and Family Weekend. In 2019, she began serving as an Associate Dean of Students, in the Office of the Dean of Students, and in addition to Orientation & New Student Programs, she helped to shape the diversity and inclusion efforts of the Student Affairs Division and provide support to UVA’s first generation and low-income students, and undergraduate student veterans. Finally, she has also donned herself The University Hype Girl and Final Exercises DJ, where her Twitter handle is actually @UVADJTAB.
Rob Craighurst
Rob’s been delighting audiences for over 20 years with stories that are goofy, serious, or both.
After attending his first National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, TN in 1976, Rob was hooked. But he wasn’t a natural-born storyteller. “I couldn’t tell a joke to save my soul.” So he wondered why he liked the great stories so much. What were those storytellers doing? The answer brought him to become what one listener exclaimed “a wicked-good storyteller.”
When he’s not telling stories, Rob is sharing his life in Charlottesville with his wife, daughter, and three cats, contra dancing, renovating a house, developing his portrait photography skills, and being a landlord. “My job is to keep people and property happy."
Stan Trent
“I can’t wait to hear more of Professor Trent’s stories! I am taken aback and touched by his storytelling and hearing first-hand about his experiences from childhood to now.” For over 30 years Stanley has received comments like this from students taking his teacher education courses at the University of Virginia. They have inspired him to share those stories more broadly. Stanley will always be a teacher at heart, and as he moves toward retirement, he looks forward to sharing his stories to larger audiences across the country and perhaps the world.
Many of his stories come from chapters of a memoir he’s writing. These stories are culled from a journal his students gave him for his birthday in 1982. He wrote about the joys of waking up and learning that schools were closed because of snow, confiscating Rubik's cubes, and Game Boys, and teaching the three R’s using story lines from E.T. and Star Wars. In 1992, after filling the pages of his hard copy from beginning to end, he began recounting his stories on his computer. Since that time, he has written thousands of pages filled with stories about his personal life including his family history, loss and birth of loved ones, faith, failure and success, dreams that became realities, and struggles that led to growth and transformation.
His storytelling has been influenced by relatives like his grandparents, aunts and uncles, and especially his 98-year-old mother who still tells him stories about his great grandfather who was a slave, her childhood sweetheart who later became his dad, his dad twice asking her father for her hand in marriage, how his dad’s best man got lost driving them to the justice of the peace for the wedding ceremony, and how he carried her across the threshold of the house he built for her as her wedding present.
Stanley has received awards for his memoir work including the Linda Julian Award for Creative Non-fiction, the notable list for The Best Essays for 2020, and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. In his spare time, he piddles on his piano, reads novels and memoirs, meditates, and works out at the gym more in January than any other month of the year. He is excited about this next chapter of his life—sharing stories to inspire growth and self-actualization.