We are excited to announce the readers for our last TrueStory of 2014. Please note the date has changed: Thursday, October 23, at 7 p.m. We are returning to Shine at 1400 E Street to finish out the year. As usual we will be hosting an open mic, so be sure to arrive early if you’d like to sign up. Check out our reader bios and we look forward to seeing you on Thursday, October 23–and, don’t forget, there’s a $5 cover!
Jen Palmares Meadows is most commonly unknown for her first novel, The Road to Death, in which two wayward adolescents are met with the grisly sight of their parents’ heads rolling from a backpack. Her writing has since appeared in The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, Memoir Journal, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, and other publications. She is currently at work on a collection of Vegas stories, where she writes about sex, gambling, and church, not necessarily in that order, but sometimes all at once. You can visit her at jenpalmaresmeadows.com.
Elaine Gale is a journalist who has covered everything from Pez Conventions for the Star Tribune to Queen Noor in her Amman palace for the LA Times. She has written for national magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, Variety, W, People, Cosmopolitan, Stuff, and Good Housekeeping, despite the irony. She has her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a doctorate in Human Communication from University of Denver. She is the co-founder of TrueStory and the founder of U-Nite, an annual arts showcase collaboration with Sac State and the Crocker. Currently, she is a Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at California State University, Sacramento, and Writing Center Director for Antioch University’s PhD Program in Leadership and Change.
Sondra Olson is a Davis-based writer and painter. “As a painter,” she says, “I am drawn to both stark and subtle undertones of light and dark revealed in shadow and in sudden bursts of illumination where identity is blurred. As a writer I am using words and phrases in the same way, moving them across the page like the brush across my painting, in subtle shifts of mood and movement.” Sondra’s art is represented in galleries in Sacramento, Palm Springs and Carmel Valley, and was featured in the 2012 Farallon Review. She is currently working on a collection of personal essays, In the Half Light: Stories and Essays on Death, Transition and Loss. She studied postgraduate literature at Bemidji State University and worked as a freelance artist and writer in northern Minnesota. She has a master in theological studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Ca.
Chris Macias has served as a feature writer for The Sacramento Bee since 1999, starting with a stint on the pop music beat. After braving countless mosh pits and 5 a.m. deadlines, he moved to his current role as The Bee’s food and wine writer in 2008. Chris’ profile of a gangbanger turned pastry chef was included in Da Capo’s Best Food Writing 2012. Outside of his newspaper work, Chris is the co-author of Echoes of an Angel (Tyndale Momentum), the true story of Ben Underwood a.k.a. “the blind boy who could see with sound.” Macias lives in Davis with his wife and two wonderful children.
