Andy Offutt Irwin - Arts Educator

Arts Educator

Irwin is a natural as a children’s performer, because at heart he is an overgrown kid. His performances for children can be traced to the summers during college that he worked as a camp counselor. It was as a camp counsel that he started using his middle name, “Offutt”, (the maiden name of his paternal grandmother and the name of a favorite uncle).

In the mid-1990s he began touring the Southeast as an arts educator and over the years he has performed in hundreds of schools and libraries. In 2000, Irwin was the keynote performer/speaker at the Library of Congress/Viburnum Foundation Conference on Family Literacy. Outside of the Southeast, his performances as an arts educator include appearances in New York City; Mesa, Arizona; Ventura County, California; Indianapolis, Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky.

Irwin’s work in schools ranges from forty-minute shows where he sings, plays guitar and tells stories (show titles include "Offutt's Environmental Epic", "Nouns, Verbs and Other Important Stuff" and "PROtozoa/ANTIbacterial") to weeklong residences where he leads workshops in songwriting, storytelling or creating a musical, usually concluding with a performance by the children of their newly-created work for their parents. He has contributed a chapter called "(I Got Those) Low-down Dirty Emergent Reader Blues" for the book Literacy Development in the Storytelling Classroom (Norfolk, Stenson and Williams, eds., 2009). The book won a 2010 Storytelling World Award in the category Special Storytelling Resources. Irwin has also written and recorded three songs for public service announcements for the Books Ahoy! Vacation Reading Program for children in Georgia and South Carolina.