Mary Taugher’s fiction has been published in The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, Prime Number Magazine, The Notre Dame Review, Coolest American Stories, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Hidden River Arts’ Eludia Award as well as Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023. An Ohio native, she lives in San Francisco where she is working on a collection of short stories.
“Launch” and “Grown Men Don’t Cry,” by Mary Taugher will be read by returning SOS actor Matthew Abergel. A Central Coast native, Matthew now makes his home in Sacramento, where he juggles a small business and creative projects. He is the author, most recently, of The Ghost of Woodland Opera House (co-authored with husband Bob Cooner), produced in 2022. His limited-series podcast, The Magician of Casablanca: A Sephardic Woman’s Quest to Save Lives in WW2, debuts this April.
Rachel Howard, a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, The Lost Night. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Zyzzyva, StoryQuarterly, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. She is also a dance critic who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and Fjord Review. She is currently editing an anthology of 21st century dance criticism to be published by the University Press of Florida, and finishing a memoir about learning to sing at a 90-year old dive piano bar in Oakland. She teaches frequently for Stanford Continuing Studies and recently served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California. She lives in Davis.
“The Woman at the Party,” by Rachel Howard will be read by Lisa Montanaro, who is making her debut with Stories on Stage. Lisa is part no-nonsense Italian American New Yorker and part sunny Californian. She has a unique background as a performer, teacher of deaf students, lawyer, coach, speaker, and author. Lisa has appeared on regional and community theater stages in New York, Michigan, and California. Most recently, she appeared in Les Miserables at the Woodland Opera House, and Cabaret at the Davis Musical Theater Company. Lisa’s novel, Everything We Thought Was True, released January 2025 by Red Adept Publishing, and won first place for LGBTQ Fiction in the International Firebird Book Awards. She is also the author of The Ultimate Life Organizer, published by Peter Pauper Press in 2011. She’s relished living snow-free since 2012 in the Davis-Woodland area, where she can be found cycling and hiking with her veterinarian husband, chasing after their rescue dog, tending to her garden, and sampling the wines of the region. Visit her website at LisaMontanaroWrites.com.