Tom Barbash
author of Stay Up With Me and The Dakota Winters
with Shelley Blanton-Stroud
Readings by Ian Hopps and Jessica Laskey
Friday, January 25 at the auditorium at CLARA
1425 24th Street, Sacramento
Doors open at 7PM, readings begin at 7:30
A $10 donation is suggested.
For ten years, Stories on Stage Sacramento has brought you the best in literature, read by actors, and this year we’re celebrating this big milestone by returning to our full, ten-event season. We’re beginning the series with excerpts from two novels, each threaded with the theme of the damage – and the gifts – parents bring to their grown children
About our Writers
Tom Barbash
Tom Barbash was previously featured at Stories on Stage Sacramento with a reading from his bestselling short story collection, Stay Up With Me, and he’s back with his new novel The Dakota Winters, an evocative and wildly absorbing tale about the Winters, a family living in New York City’s famed Dakota apartment building. It’s a family drama, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City in the year leading up to John Lennon’s assassination. It isn’t giving anything away to say that John Lennon himself is one of the main characters in the novel, along with such Seventies luminaries as Johnny Carson and the Kennedys, Teddy and Joan. Tom Barbash’s first novel, The Last Good Chance, won the California Book Award, and Stay Up With Me was nominated for the Folio Prize. His nonfiction book, On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal, was a New York Times bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney’s, VQR, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio for their Selected Shorts Series. He teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and currently lives in Marin County.
Shelley Blanton-Stroud
Shelley Blanton-Stroud is a Sacramento writer, teacher, editor, and writing coach whose stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Brevity, This Side of the Divide: Stories of The American West, and Aethlon, A Journal of Sports Literature, among others. She teaches English and writing at California State University, Sacramento, and is currently revising two novels.
About our Readers
This is Ian Hopps’ first appearance at Stories on Stage Sacramento but he’s a familiar face to Sacramento and Davis audiences: since his 2016 move to Sacramento from the Bay Area he’s appeared in leading roles with Capital Stage (Luna Gale, Stupid F***ing Bird,) the Sacramento Theatre Company (Macbeth, The Tempest) and Big Idea Theatre (The Rover, An Ideal Husband, The 39 Steps.) He’s the former associate producer and marketing director of the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble and has appeared in numerous productions there. He studied Theatre Arts at San Francisco State University, and in addition to acting, he writes for indie comics and podcasts, and produces his own music.
Jessica Laskey is very happy to be back at Stories on Stage! As an Equity actress, she has performed for Sacramento Theatre Co., Capital Stage, and California Stage and she’s the co-founding Artistic Director of Theater Galatea. Laskey is a freelance writer for Inside Publications, Sacramento Magazine, Sactown Magazine, Comstock’sand The Sacramento Bee and is the founding co-publisher of Indomita Press. She is also on the board of sister series Stories on Stage Davis.
About Stories on Stage Sacramento
Now in its tenth season, Stories on Stage Sacramento is proud of its record, as an all-volunteer, donation-based organization, of bringing the best in literary fiction, read by actors, to a growing Sacramento audience. Our six 2017 events featured work by Steve Almond, Deborah Willis, Josh Barkan, Vanessa Hua, Joshua Mohr, the Los Rios Writers, and Josh Weil, as well as several of Sacramento’s notable emerging writers.
Our 2018 season featured the writers Anne Raeff, Mira T. Lee, Elizabeth Tallent, Bob Sylva, Kirstin Chen, Tommy Orange, Vanessa Hua, Melissa Yancy and Dana Johnson. The dates for our 2018 season are: February 23, April 27, June 29, August 24, and October 26. In addition, our annual showcase featuring the Los Rios Writers will take place on Friday, September 28.
in 2019, we’ll welcome Tom Barbash, Karen E Bender (a National Book Award finalist) Sharma Shields, and exciting new writers Sarah Stone, Devi Lasker, and Fred D’Aguiar. And we’ll welcome back the Los Rios Writers. More will be announced: watch this space!
