Runway Stories Litquake Edition

Radium Runway
Thursday, October 17
Venue Opens: 6pm
Show: 7pm-9pm

2151 Ferry Point — adjacent to Seaplane Lagoon Promenade — in Alameda Point

Four Moth Storyslam and Grandslam royalty curated by JP Frary plus four Litquake authors take this beautiful outdoor stage for Runway Stories as we hear tales centered around the theme, "First Love.” Featuring storytellers Don Reed, Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, Beau Ryder Davis, and Kimberli Joy, and authors Sarah Thornton (Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts), Tina Horn (Why Are People Into That? A Cultural Investigation of Kink), Dominic Lim (Karaoke Queen), and Mas Masumoto (Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm). 

  • Beau Ryder Davis is a comedian and storyteller based in Oakland, California. He is a 8-time Moth Story Slam winner, most recent Bay Area Moth GrandSlam winner, and has appeared on the nationally syndicated Moth Radio Hour. He's currently working on a show about growing up in the rural mountain town of Hazard, Kentucky, which was rated "the least happy town in America" in 2008 by the esteemed Dr. Oz television show. He promises this show is funny and not as sad as Hazard. To earn money, Beau is a Marketing Manager for Hidden Valley Ranch. Yes, he can get you samples.

  • Dhaya Lakshminarayanan stand-up comedian, storyteller and writer.

    Dhaya’s debute album DHAYATRIBE debuted #2 on iTunes. She received the Liz Carpenter Political Humor Award (previously awarded to Samantha Bee, Wanda Sykes and Mark Russell) for her stand-up. Comedy Central Asia crowned her the Grand Prize Winner of “The Ultimate Comedy Challenge” filmed in Singapore. Bay Area PBS affiliate KQED named her one of the twenty “Women to Watch,” a series celebrating women artists, creatives and makers who are pushing boundaries. She has performed across Asia in Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. She has also been invited to perform at some of the top festivals in the US including Bridgetown Comedy Festival, San Francisco Sketchfest, The Boston Comedy Festival, Limestone Comedy Festival, and Laugh Your Asheville Off. She is the sole subject of the documentary “NerdCool” which premiered at the LA Comedy Festival.

    Dhaya has worked with a variety of progressive headliners including Ronny Chieng, Janeane Garofalo, Greg Behrendt, Anthony Jeselnik, Maz Jobrani, Greg Proops, and the late Dick Gregory. Dhaya once introduced former Vice President Al Gore at an event. He then laughed onstage at her joke, so technically she’s opened for Al Gore.

    As a television host, Dhaya helmed the inaugural season of the Emmy award-winning series High School Quiz Show on PBS’s WGBH. She is a frequent comedic storyteller on NPR’s Snap Judgment. She currently serves as the host of San Francisco’s monthly Moth.

    Dhaya is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America (West), joining after her writing work for Sony Columbia/Montecito Productions. She consulted on “Enough About Me” by MSNBC’s Richard Lui and written for podcasts, universities, and live events.

    Dhaya’s first solo play “Nerd Nation” was funded in part by The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center of San Francisco and DIVAfest which supports new and developing works by female playwrights.

    Prior to her endeavors in the entertainment business, Dhaya was a venture capitalist, management consultant, and two-time MIT graduate. You can indeed call her a nerd.

  • Dominic Lim’s debut novel, All the Right Notes, has been named a 2023 best book by USA Today, Harper’s Bazaar, Goodreads, BookRiot, Library Journal, Booklist, and Entertainment Weekly, who called it “a swoony, joyful rom-com to take readers into a love story worthy of a Broadway stage.” He is a member of the Writers Grotto and is a co-host of the long-running Babylon Salon reading and performance series in San Francisco. Dominic holds a Master of Music from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, is an alum of Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, and has sung with numerous professional early music and choral ensembles. As a proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association he has performed Off-Broadway and in regional productions throughout the US. He works as a paralegal for a biotech company in the Bay Area and lives in Oakland with his loving and supportive husband, Peter, and their whiny cat, Phoebe.

  • Don Reed is the host/producer/curator of Redwood Nights: Storytelling Under the Stars at Deer Park Villa. He was a Theatre Bay Area – WINNER – for Outstanding Solo Production East 14th and is currently Co-Producing filmmaker Robert Townsend‘s solo hit Living the Shuffle. A San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Nominee and NAACP Triple Nominee for Best Actor & Best Playwright, he played one of the lead roles in the Amazon Prime comedy series Bartlett which was co-financed and stars Lin Manuel Miranda (creator of the Broadway smash HAMILTON) in a recurring role. He was the long time opening act for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

  • Kimberlli Joy has been weaving the truth into humorous stories for as long as she can remember. In June 2022, she was thrilled to share a stage with JP at The Moth. She is a familiar face at Redwood Nights Storytelling under the Stars and has entertained audiences at Oakland Story Slam, About Last Night, and The Marsh. As the co-host of Gem Tales with Andrea Page, she gets excited uncovering the gems in the stories that shape us.

  • Mas Masumoto is an organic peach, nectarine, apricot, and grape farmer and a pioneer in organic farming since the 1980s. He is the author of thirteen books including: Epitaph for a Peach, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, and a cookbook, The Perfect Peach. A documentary, Changing Season on the Masumoto Family Farm, was nationally broadcast by PBS in 2016. His newest book, Secret Harvests is about a family history of struggles, disabilities and secrets.

  • Sarah Thornton is a sociologist with “a reporter’s nose and a Double D brain.” She is the author of four critically acclaimed non-fiction books, including TITS UP, an exploration of the subcultures of breasts, deemed “required reading” and “a healing journey,” that ensures “You will not look at breasts in the same way again.” For three years while researching this 2024 publication, Thornton was a scholar-in-residence at University of California, Berkeley. A lapsed academic, Thornton did her PhD on “hipness” and the cultural hierarchies within popular culture. Once the chief writer on art for The Economist, Thornton is also the author of Seven Days in the Art World, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, and 33 Artists in 3 Acts, which is available in eight. Thornton lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

  • Tina Horn is a writer, educatrix, and media-maker. She is the author of Why Are People Into That?: A Cultural Investigation of Kink (Hachette), a book based on her long-running indie fetish podcast. Tina is the creator/writer of the sci-fi sex-rebel comic book series Safe Sex / SfSx (Image), and the cult detective thriller Deprog; she was also the host/cowriter of the phone sex podcast Operator (Wondery). Her reporting on sexual subcultures has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Hazlitt, Glamour, Jezebel and elsewhere; she is the author of two other nonfiction books and has contributed to numerous anthologies including We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, which she also coedited. She is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow, an AVN nominee, the recipient of two Feminist Porn Awards, and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence. @TinaHornsAss / TinaHorn.net