By Emily Masuda
Special to the Express
Stories on Stage Davis opens its 8th season on Saturday, Sept. 12, with the short story “Like Water on Stone,” by Zeeva Bukai, read by regional favorite Martha Omiyo Kight. The episode will mark the start of the series’s first all-podcast season. In Bukai’s story, a zealous young man, raised in a strict culture, gets his first chance with a girl. The encounter gives him a glimpse of who he becomes in the presence of another, and how sometimes we know ourselves only well enough to know what we desire.
Zeeva Bukai is a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in “The Master’s Review,” “Jewish Fiction.net,” “McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,” “Image Journal,” “Flash Fiction Magazine,” “December Magazine” and elsewhere. Her work was awarded “The Master’s Review” Fall Fiction prize (judged by Anita Felicelli), and the Curt Johnson Prose Award (judged by Lily King). She was a 2014 Fellow at the Center for Fiction in NYC, an artist in residence at the Byrdcliff AIR program in Woodstock, New York, and was awarded a 2019 residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, WA. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and teaches writing at SUNY, Empire State College.
Reading Bukai’s story is returning Stories on Stage Davis actor Martha Omiyo Kight, who has been active in the Sacramento area theatre community for four decades as an actor, singer, poet, director, props mistress, and costumer. Most recently, she appeared in the inaugural production of Sacramento’s Black Point Theatre, “The Field,” and “Shakespeare in Love” at SCC’s Sacramento City Theatre, roles for which she was nominated for Supporting Female in Sacramento’s Elly Awards. Martha has been writing poetry and reading her own and others’ work since 2009.
The Stories on Stage Davis podcast airs new episodes every second and fourth Saturday, and its eighth season will run from September 2020 to June 2021. Upcoming and past episodes, as well as ways to support the series can be found on the Stories on Stage Davis website. Stories on Stage Davis is a sponsored project of YoloArts, a non-profit arts organization.
For more information, and to listen to the podcast, visit http://storiesonstagedavis.com/.
