Sue Staats has been the coordinator for Stories on Stage since October 2013. Following the very successful model established by founder Valerie Fioravanti, she continues to present the finest in new fiction by established and emerging writers.
A 35-year resident of Sacramento, originally from the East coast, Sue lives and writes in the leafy backwater of Curtis Park in a small house with a large cat and a famous guest house. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Los Angeles Review, Graze, Farallon Review, Alimentum, a Journal of Food, and Tule Review. She was a runner-up for the 2011 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and her poem “Late Peaches” was the title poem for the 2012 anthology, Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets. She earned a MFA at Pacific University in 2011, and her stories have been performed numerous times at Stories on Stage Sacramento and Stories on Stage Davis. Sue is currently working on a collection of linked short stories.
Peggi Wood is the casting director for Stories on Stage Sacramento. A director and producer on the Sacramento theatre scene, she is also a minimalist writer, burgeoning screenwriter and lush storyteller, performing locally at various venues. In 2015, Resurrection Theatre produced Peggi’s first short play, Demerol Dreams, in their 10×10 Original Play Festival, where she also directed two other plays. Her community theatre productions include DOG SEES GOD: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead and Moving Mountains with EMH Productions and Dan Fagan’s A Tiger Without Mercy. A longtime volunteer for the arts, literacy and community service organizations, Peggi is also the social media director and board member for Celebration Arts, a multicultural, multidisciplinary educational and performing arts nonprofit organization. Her work with Celebration Arts, where she has been involved from the casting process through rehearsal and staging a production for more than two dozen shows, as well as being an avid theater-goer throughout the region and a performer herself, gives her access to a wide range of talent and a keen understanding of drama to match the perfect actor to a writer’s work. Peggi graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Mass Communication and a Masters in Public and Political Communication from California State University, Sacramento with research awards for her rhetorical analyses of inequality and power as well as guilt, shame and redemption, issues that inform her creative work.
Valerie Fioravanti, founder and former director/coordinator for Stories on Stage Sacramento, created the reading series in early 2010 as a way to inspire and connect writers in the Sacramento region.
Her linked story collection, Garbage Night at the Opera, won the 2011 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and is available from BkMk Press. Stories from the collection have appeared in North American Review, Cimarron Review, and Night Train, among others. In 2004 Valerie received a Fulbright Fellowship to work on a novel set in Italy, Bel Casino. Her essays have appeared in Portland Review, Eclectica, Silk Road, Puerto del Sol, and others. She teaches writing, works as a writing coach, and coordinates the Master Teacher Weekend Workshops series. A NYC native, Valerie lives contentedly in tree-lined, walkable midtown Sacramento–home to a great restaurant scene; impressive, wide-ranging theatre options; and some very talented and generous writers. Visit her website at valeriefioravanti.com.
