Renée Thompson’s stories have appeared in Crossborder, Narrative, Literal Latte, Arcadia, Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and Chiron Review. She has placed as a finalist in competitions sponsored by Narrative, Literal Latte, Glimmer Train, and Writer’s Digest. She is the author of two novels, The Plume Hunter and The Bridge at Valentine, which was recently selected as the 2014 community book for Woodland Reads. She is currently working on a new novel.
Patty Shade will read “The Volunteer” by Renée Thompson. Shade performed in many music and theater productions throughout the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul over the thirty years that she lived there. She performed this past summer in the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble productions of Much Ado About Nothing and the musical She Loves Me. She also sings with the Davis Chorale and is a board member of that organization. Shade is currently a Lower Elementary Teacher at Bergamo Montessori School in Sacramento. She is happy to make her debut with Stories on Stage Davis.
Tracy Guzeman, still a Midwesterner at heart, grew up outside of Chicago, and received her degree in landscape architecture from Iowa State University. She has held various marketing positions in Silicon Valley start-ups, and for the past seventeen years has owned her own company, providing event management and consulting services across a wide range of industries. A Pushcart Prize nominee, and a featured author for the 2014 Twitter Fiction Festival, her work has been published in Vestal Review, Glimmer Train, and Gulf Coast, where her story “Einstein” received honorable mention for the Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Her first novel, The Gravity of Birds, was published by Simon & Schuster, and foreign rights have sold to ten countries. Of the novel, the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “Guzeman’s book is about sibling rivalry, tragedies and resurrections. And it’s irresistibly exquisite.” She is currently working on her second novel.
Cynthia Speakman will read “Fletcher” by Tracy Guzeman. Speakman’s life is all about performing and teaching, mostly through humor. For twelve years she performed with the spoken word group StoryVoices and for over ten years has been teaching children’s theatre. The list of plays in which she has acted ranges from The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman to Harvey and Alice in Wonderland as the Queen of Hearts. She recently completed work in an independent film, In God We Trust, to be released in March. You may occasionally hear her in radio commercials or see her downtown giving a Segway tour or Hysterical Walk in Old Sac. She wants to thank the Sacramento and Davis communities for being so supportive of their artists.
