Austin Smith’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, VQR, and Glimmer Train, among others. His first full collection of poems, Almanac, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Stories on Stage Davis will feature “The Ghost Man,” published in the winter 2014 issue of Glimmer Train.
David Anthony Hance will read “The Ghost Man” by Austin Smith. Hance has been involved in the theater since the age of ten, after being stage-struck when his father took him to see a Davis Comic Opera Company performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. While he grew up in Davis and graduated from UCD, Hance has lived and worked elsewhere in California for more than thirty years. He has performed in more than 150 stage productions, was the executive director of a community-based theater company and playhouse, a part-time theater instructor at a community college, and a partner in Espressivo! Chamber Theatre, which created short, portable, original musical plays. Hance is active in the theater as a writer, producer, director, singer, and actor. Most recently, he performed the last four summer seasons with the Central Coast Shakespeare Festival. He and his wife, Christine (also a singer and actor), relocated to Davis from San Luis Obispo in November 2013.
Ginny Johnson is a writer living in Davis. Her play, The Last of Everything, was performed in Santa Monica, California, in 2005. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, and she received an honorable mention for an excerpt of her novel, Honeysuckle, in the 2008 National Writing Competition for Lawyers. She is currently writing a collection of short stories set in Alabama, her home state. We’re featuring “The Quarters,” an excerpt from Honeysuckle.
Gay Cooper will read “The Quarters” by Ginny Johnson. Cooper is thrilled to be reading here at Stories on Stage Davis, after appearing many times at SoS Sacramento. She has acted with many theater companies in the area, including Resurrection Theater, Big Idea Theater, Kolt Run Creations, and California Stage. She has also worked in commercials and industrial films, both here in California and her home state of Tennessee. She has always been drawn to the magical alchemy of actor and writer in creating a storytelling experience that is rich and compelling.
