authors Tom Barbash & Shelley Blanton-Stroud, readers ian c. hopps & Jessica Laskey, Opening night, january 25, 2019

Authors Tom Barbash & Shelley Blanton-Stroud, readers Ian C. Hopps & Jessica Laskey

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.

Celebrate the opening of Stories on Stage Sacramento's tenth season on Friday, January 25, 2019 at the Clara Auditorium. Featured will be Tom Barbash, author of The Dakota Winters, a book about fathers, sons, John Lennon, and life in New York's legendary Dakota Apartments. We'll also hear Shelley Blanton-Stroud's "Attention Must be Paid." Readings will be performed by Ian C. Hopps and Jessica Laskey.

Friday, January 25
Clara Auditorium
1425 24th Street, Sacramento
Doors open at 7PM. Readings begin at 7:30. 
A $10 donation is suggested. 

About our writers
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.  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 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 writing at California State University, Sacramento, has a novel, Copy Boy, coming out in June 2020, and is currently revising another.

About our readers
Ian C. Hopps makes his first appearance at Stories on Stage Sacramento for this performance, 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’s and 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.

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