recently retired from teaching writing at Sacramento State University and still consults with writers in the energy industry. She serves as President of the Board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. She recently stepped down from co-directing Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging authors. Copy Boy was her first Jane Benjamin Novel, Tomboy her second. The third, Poster Girl, is new in bookstores. Blanton-Stroud and her husband live in Sacramento, California, surrounded by photos of their sons, their partners, and their nearly perfect grandchild.
At CrimeReads she tagged five favorite difficult women in historical fiction, including:
Ruby Fortune in Ashley E. Sweeney’s HardlandRead about the other entries on the list.
(Published in 2022, set in 1899.) Set in the Arizona Territory, Ruby must either murder her abusive husband or live with bruises that never heal. Onebullet decides it. Once the “Girl Wonder” of the Wild West circuit, Ruby becomes a single mother of four boys in her hometown of Jericho, an end-of-the-world mining town. Ruby runs a roadside inn, hosting drifters, grifters, con men, and prostitutes—people she innately understands. She has a love affair that puts her life and livelihood at risk, but she won’t let him go. She does what she figures she needs to, in order to provide for herself and her sons. Ruby’s strong, sexual, skilled with a gun, and unequivocal about her own survival and that of her children, which, for many readers, rescues her from unlikability, since mother-love is a saving grace, maybe the saving grace.
--Marshal Zeringue
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