We’ve come full circle! In January 2019 we opened with Tom Barbash’s acclaimed novel The Dakota Winters. This month, we’re back at The Dakota, with Christine S. O’Brien’s secretly dysfunctional family, Lauren Bacall, and meals consisting of blended salads and a handful of almonds, leaving Christine and her brothers exceedingly hungry. Also featuring Jen Palmares Meadows and a reading from her memoir-in-progress, Betting on Brown.
Friday, October 25
At the Auditorium at CLARA, 1425 24th Street, Sacramento
Doors open at 7PM, readings begin at 7:30
A $10 donation is suggested
Readings by Kelley Ogden and Justine Lopez
about Christine S. O’Brien
Christine O’Brien’s memoir, CRAVE, A Memoir of Food and Longing, was hailed as a “page turner” by Booklist and “a 20th Century fairytale” by The New York Times. The daughter of Academy Award-, Emmy Award-, and Golden Globe-winning movie and television producer Edgar J. Scherick, Christine grew up in New York City and Beverly Hills, and has been writing since she was nine years old. She’s the host of the podcast, Good Morning Writing!, and her lyrical essays and short stories have appeared in The Seneca Review and The Slush Pile Magazine, among other publications. She has taught memoir writing at The Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA and was the nonfiction workshop teacher at the Leopardi Writer’s Conference in Recanati, Italy in July 2019. She lives in the Bay area with her husband and two children and teaches at St. Mary’s College
about Jen Palmares Meadows
Jen Palmares Meadows’ essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony Fellow, and a recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. A Sacramento writer, she earned a M.A. in Creative Writing from California State University Sacramento and is currently completing Betting On Brown, an experimental coming-of-age gambling memoir, mixing lyrical prose with card games, recipes, and reportage
About our readers
Kelley Ogden
A frequent reader at Stories on Stage Sacramento, Kelley Ogden is an actress, writer, director and producer, who was most recently seen onstage in the Capital Stage productions of Between Riverside and Crazy and Sweat. In addition to working with Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, Main Street Theatre Works and Theater Galatea, Ogden co-founded KOLT Run Creations, a local fringe theater company. She earned a BFA in performance from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. She will read an excerpt from Christine S. O’Brien’s CRAVE, A Memoir of Food and Longing.
Justine Lopez
Justine Lopez is a Filipino-American actor, comedian, and teacher, born and raised in Sacramento, CA. She studied theatre arts at Cosumnes River College where her acting credits included This is Not What I Ordered, The Chisera, and Dead Man’s Cell Phone. After college she discovered improv comedy. She has studied and performed at ComedySportz Sacramento and Sacramento Comedy Spot, where she now instructs Improv 101 and leads workshops around the Sacramento area. At the Sacramento Comedy Spot she performs in improv troupes such as Lady Business, Anti-Cooperation League, Masters of Rap Improv, and Improv Jazz. During the day, Justine teaches improv as an after-school program at John F. Kennedy High School.
About Stories on Stage Sacramento
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 proud of our 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 welcome Tom Barbash, Karen E Bender (a National Book Award finalist) Sharma Shields, Janet Fitch, Maggie Shen King and exciting new writers Sarah Stone, Devi Lasker, Fred D’Aguiar, Simeon Mills, Christine O’Brien., and Jen Alandy Trahan. And we’ll welcome back the Los Rios Writers. Plus outstanding work by local writers, and of course the famous Stories on Stage cookies!
Stories on Stage Sacramento 