Atim Udoffia and Brad Buchanan

Atim Udoffia is the first guest on the program, detailing her storied career in theatre. She speaks on her upcoming event, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's As You Like it which will show the weekends of August 22nd and August 30th at the CLARA auditorium in Sacramento. Brad Buchanon is the second  guest of the hour. Buchanon discusses chess, his medical memoir, and excitingly his upcoming novel Spy's Gate. He shares his writing process, some of the thematic inspirations for the novel, including The Queen's Gambit, and the self-titled poem for his next poetry collection.

Atim Udoffia is a theatre artist and a mother of two working in theatre and film/video in the Sacramento and Bay Area. While continuing to expand her body of work as an actor and director, Udoffia aims to build a creative pipeline enabling trained, experienced theatre artists to initiate projects and generate their own creative opportunities. Favorite stage roles include Emilie in EMILIE LA MARQUISE DU CHATELET DEFENDS HER LIFE TONIGHT (The Stage @ Burke Junction), Lady Macbeth (STC), and Rosalind in AS YOU LIKE IT, which she also adapted and produced. Udoffia’s film credits include the feature films No Address, Fairyland, and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie. As a director, her work includes the solo show MINE FOR THE TRIBE, DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA, OTHELLO, and the one-act CHARLIE AND NELL, for which she received a Best Director Award. Udoffia earned a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University before pursuing acting training in London and Los Angeles. 

Brad Buchanon’s poetry, short fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in more than 200 literary journals. He has published four book-length collections of poetry, most recently Chimera (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Buchanan has also published three academic books, most recently ’Indict the Author of Affection’: Affectation and Catachresis in Hamlet (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023). His medical memoir, Living with Graft-Versus-Host-Disease, was published by Armin Lear Press in 2021. Spy's Mate, his historical chess-espionage thriller set in the late Cold War Soviet Union, will be published this fall.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. 

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.