Jay Stratton

By Daniel Chacón,

Will Rose

Published May 24, 2026 at 5:00 PM MDT

In this episode of Words on a Wire, host Daniel Chacón sits down with actor, director, and The University of Texas at El Paso theater professor Jay Stratton for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, performance, teaching, and life in the arts. Stratton reflects on his years as a working actor in New York City, his journey from business student to theater artist, and the realities of building a career in regional theater. Along the way, the discussion expands into larger questions about storytelling, boredom, childhood imagination, academia, parenting, and the pressures of modern productivity. Thoughtful, funny, and deeply personal, the episode explores how art shapes the way we connect with community, culture, and ourselves. This is part 1 of a 2 part interview.

Additional information

For more information about Jay Stratton you can visit: https://www.jay-stratton.com/

Originally aired on May 24, 2026

Tags

Words On A Wire KTEP Programming

Daniel Chacón

Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories, Unending Rooms, was the 2007 winner of the Hudson Prize. He has also been awarded the American Book Award, the Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Southwest Book Award. His first collection of stories, Chicano Chicanery was a finalist in the Patterson Fiction Prize and his novel and the shadows took him is available from Simon and Schuster. His new book is a collection of stories called Hotel Júarez: Stories, Rooms and Loops. He’s a professor of Fiction Writing, Kafka, and Latino/a literature in the Creative Writing Department at UTEP.

See stories by Daniel Chacón

Will Rose

Will Rose is a longtime technology and marketing executive based out of NYC and Texas. He is the co-founder of Words on a Wire’s publishing imprint, eRadical Books, and now spearheads marketing strategy for the Words on a Wire podcast. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer at the EdTech startup, Student Select, and as Head of Data Science at the artificial intelligence company, Harqen AI.

See stories by Will Rose