MEET THE AUTHOR…
Shelley Blanton-Stroud writes historical fiction about women, power, and overlooked California history. She is the author of An Unlikely Prospect and the award-recognized Jane Benjamin historical mystery series—Copy Boy, Tomboy, and Poster Girl—novels that explore journalism, public life, and moral conflict in twentieth-century California. Her work also appears in the anthology, Sacramento Noir.
Shelley grew up in Bakersfield, California, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. Recently retired after three decades teaching writing in the California State University system, she continues to consult with professional writers in the U.S. energy industry.
She has served as president of the board of 916 Ink, a Sacramento nonprofit that supports youth writing, and on the advisory board of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. She previously co-directed Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors performed the stories of established and emerging authors.
WITH A FEW MORE DETAILS
I grew up with truckloads of grannies, grandpas, cousins, aunts and uncles in Wasco and Bakersfield, California. My dad came from a family of red-headed field laborers. My mom was a farmer’s beautiful only daughter. My brother was a wrestler, which, in the Central Valley, made him kind of a big deal.
I never was anything special there–not a memorable student or athlete or cheerleader. But I did hold down all kinds of jobs, curating a vivid collection of polyester uniforms. (Der Wienerschnitzel, H Salt Seafood Galley and Wendy’s Old Fashioned stand out in the polaroids.) And I apparently hold the record for most unpaid parking tickets earned in a one-year period in the history of West Bakersfield High School.
I went south at eighteen, just east of Los Angeles, to Claremont Men’s College (now called Claremont McKenna), where I learned about Izods and penny loafers and met my Young Republican husband (whom I proceeded to turn into a born-again liberal).
Together, we moved north to Silicon Valley and San Francisco for more school and work before finally settling, as people do, in the middle, Sacramento, where we’ve raised two solid citizens who wash dishes, read actual books and help in the vegetable garden–Sacramento virtues, all.
I had worked here in Sacramento for decades, raising these boys, teaching college writing and then coaching scientists and economists and engineers how to write in a plain style, before I ever took up writing my own stories. I do that now, obsessively, in between coaching other writers and editing white papers.
I do like short stories for their more-immediate gratification. But my heart is in the novel. My first, Copy Boy, germinated back in Bakersfield. Set in the Great Depression, it follows Jane, a seventeen-year-old girl who tries to escape her family’s hard, rural life to reinvent herself as a boy in San Francisco. The Jane Benjamin trilogy follows her adventures. No matter how she scrubs that Central Valley dust off her elbows and knees, she’s inhaled too much. It floats in her blood like spores. There’s something personal about that.