Texas Book Festival’s Must-Know Authors
Celebrate the Texas Book Festival’s 20th anniversary with a few of the most talented women in the industry.
For its 20th anniversary, the Texas Book Festival is bringing some big names to the Capitol to celebrate. Among them are powerful women authors, such as Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout and Margo Jefferson. From fiction to nonfiction, their stories analyze and examine racial divides, family ties, love lost and the importance of friendship. Make the most of your time at the Texas Book Fest by attending talks with these authors.
Fiction
Margaret Atwood
10 to 10:45 a.m., House Chamber
Renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood has published more than 40 works, including poetry, children’s books, fiction and nonfiction novels. Her writing spans the globe and has been translated into more than 40 languages, including Farsi, Korean and Finnish. She received the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice, as well as the Man Booker Prize (2011), often being referred to as “one of Canada’s finest living writers.” This year, she will speak at the Texas Book Festival’s Gala.
The Heart Goes Last
Atwood’s latest novel, The Heart Goes Last, is a dark, dystopian look at a social and economic collapse that causes couple Stan and Charmaine to live out of their Honda. They see an ad for a social experiment known as the Positron Project, offering full employment and housing, with a twist: You must live in prison every other month while your home is inhabited by a pair of counterparts. Complications arise during the seemingly promising project when Stan and Charmaine fall in love with their counterparts.
Elizabeth Strout
2:15 to 3:15 p.m., The Sanctuary at First United Methodist Church
Mesmerized by books from an early age, Elizabeth Strout has managed to propel her passion into a successful career yielding four novels and a Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge (2008). Her short story Snow Blind, originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, was selected as an O. Henry Prize Story (2015), and she will speak as part of the O. Henry Panel at the Texas Book Festival this year. Her fifth novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, is set to publish in January 2016.
Snow Blind
In this short story, Strout examines the life of Annie Appleby, who possessed the ability to hear God, something that shocks her parents and leads her to be ridiculed by other children. Annie grows up to establish a life far away, returning to face her family’s mysterious secrets.
Amanda Eyre Ward
1 to 1:45 p.m., Texas Tent
She wasn’t a born Austinite, but Amanda Eyre Ward became one in 1998 when she moved to Texas’ capital city and began working on her novel Sleep Toward Heaven (2003.) While writing, she simultaneously worked for The Austin Chronicle and various online startup companies, managing to win third place in The Austin Chronicle’s short-story contest for her work Miss Montana’s Wedding Day. She won a Violet Crown Book Award for Sleep Toward Heaven and traveled throughout London and Paris with her mother and her baby by her side in order to promote the book.
The Same Sky
A tale of two women learning to listen to their hearts and make decisions that will ultimately lead them to become who they were meant to be, The Same Sky was inspired by Ward’s visits to shelters in Texas and California, where she worked with immigrant children. Alice, an Austinite stuck in an unfulfilling marriage, and Carla, a teen forced to take care of herself and her brother after her mother leaves to cross the border into America, face difficult decisions leading to the intertwining of their paths. The Same Sky is an exploration of identity and the courage it takes to realize where you belong.
Sloane Crosley
1:45 to 2:45 p.m., Central Presbyterian Church
Sloane Crosley is familiar with both the book-publishing industry and the magazine-publishing industry, her work appearing in publications such as Esquire, Bon Appetit and The New York Times’ Op-Ed series Townies before she began writing full time. Crosley was featured in The 50 Funniest Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to the Onion, and even started a tragically endearing blog called Sad Things in the Street. She currently serves on the board of Housing Works Bookstore and is co-chair of the Young Lions Committee at the New York Public Library.
The Clasp
Released on Oct. 6, this novel is a comedy of sorts about Kezia, Nathaniel and Victor, a group of college friends who reunite for a wedding years after graduation. After a fainting spell in the mother of the groom’s bedroom, Victor is told a story of the mysterious disappearance of a necklace during World War II in Nazi-occupied France. The group sets off on an adventure across the United States and Europe, which ultimately leads them to examine their roles in each other’s lives.
Mary Helen Specht
4:15 to 5 p.m., Texas Tent
Mary Helen Specht is a Texas native, born and raised in Abilene. She has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, and her previous work can be found in The New York Times, World Literature Today and The Texas Observer. She currently resides in Austin and teaches writing at St. Edward’s University, but was at one time a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and a Dobie Paisano Writing Fellow. Her debut novel, Migratory Animals, was chosen as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, an Indie Next Selection, an Apple iBook selection and an Austin American-Statesman Selects book.
Migratory Animals
In Migratory Animals, Flannery loses funding for her lab in Nigeria and is forced to return home to Austin and take care of her sister, who is exhibiting signs of the genetic disease that killed her mother and whose health is rapidly deteriorating. In an atmosphere where she feels like she no longer belongs, Flannery experiences run-ins with old college friends who are unhappy in their settled lives, only making the yearning for Africa more stringent. Migratory Animals is about the choice between family and the need to chase your dreams, alternately examining how friendships change and evolve through time.
Shanna Mahin
4 to 4:45, Capitol Extension Room E1.026
Told she would live a “lifetime of wasted potential” by her 9th grade English teacher, Shanna Mahin made it her burning desire to make something of herself. As a high-school dropout and former dog walker, Mahin had to work hard and dream big, and finally has a novel to show for it. Still extremely new to the publishing world, she has substantially caught the attention of The New York Times and Vanity Fair for her novel Oh! You Pretty Things.
Oh! You Pretty Things
Jess Dunne is a third-generation Hollywood girl with an astringent interest in the celebrity lifestyle she is surrounded by. Hoping to gain a title more reputable than her current one as barista, she snags a job cooking for a film composer, only to get offered a job by an actress as well. Her desire to upgrade her job yet again has unforeseen consequences when she is forced to face secrets about herself she has been ignoring all her life. Oh! You Pretty Things parallels much to the life of Mahin herself, one of hard work, dedication and the ability to pull yourself out of a rut and get back on your feet.
Jennine Capó Crucet
11 to 11:45 a.m., Capitol Extension Room E.2012
Jennine Capó Crucet grew up in Miami, the first member of her family to be born on American soil. Many of her works explore the Americanization of Cuban culture, and are based on the firsthand experience she gained growing up. Capó Crucet was named Best Up-And-Coming Author (2015) by the Miami New Times for her impressive collection of stories How to Leave Hileah, and has been awarded the Winthrop Prize and Residency for Emerging Writers. She has spent time working with at-risk teens in the South Central and downtown Los Angeles area in hopes of providing the same generosity that was shown to her throughout her education. Capó Crucet’s most recent novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, was named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and named a best book of the season by Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and other publications.
Make Your Home Among Strangers
A tumultuous tale, Make Your Home Among Strangers examines the obstacles faced by Lizet, the first person in her family to graduate high school and a soon-to-be college freshman at Rawlings. After a surprise trip home for Thanksgiving, she begins to experience dissonance between her college identity and her home identity, which is made worse by her mother’s fearless crusade in the battle to help a Cuban child whose mother died trying to help him cross into America. Lizet must make a series of emotional decisions regarding her family and her new awareness of herself as part of a minority.
Nonfiction
Sandra Cisneros
3 to 3:45 p.m., Central Presbyterian Church
Sandra Cisneros is not only a writer, but also the founder of Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, organizations benefiting writers. She has written and studied Latina experiences in the United States throughout the years, writing first as a way to deal with her frequent moves from home to home as a child. She has written many short stories, including Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), which was named Book of the Year by The New York Times and American Library Journal and was nominated Best Book of Fiction by The Los Angeles Times. She has been writing for 45 years, 20 of which writing was her means of earning a living.
A House of My Own
In a life that is continually being uprooted, it can be hard to find a place to call home. A House of My Own is an autobiography focused on how Cisneros created a home in her career and her friendships, offering a look at the jigsaw pieces that make up Cisnero’s life and how they have woven together through time to create what she deems her home today.
Margo Jefferson
12:30 to 1:15 p.m., Capitol Auditorium Room E1.004
Currently a professor of nearly 25 years at Columbia University, Margo Jefferson was appointed critic-at-large by The New York Times for theater (1996) after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (1995.) She is known most widely for her book On Michael Jackson, a cultural analysis of America during the rise and fall of the pop sensation. Among other awards Jefferson has received are the Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation and Theater Communications Group Grant.
Negroland
Margo Jefferson’s memoir, Negroland, is about her experience about growing up in a privileged area of Chicago with opportunities so different than those offered to many other African-Americans at the time. The novel spans many notable moments in African-American history, such as the Civil Rights movement and the start of feminism, through the eyes of a privileged girl living in Negroland, a part of Negro America where residents enjoy privileges that shelter them from the very real condition of other members of the African-American community.
Linda Gray
11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., House Chamber
From acting and directing, to serving as a United Nations ambassador, Linda Gray has enough life advice to write a book of her own, and finally decided to do so. In her younger years, she played Sue Ellen Ewing on Dallas and was nominated for an Emmy Award while taking part in philanthropy work as well. She became the American Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations in 1997, with the goal of promoting women’s rights, and it was a position she held until 2007. She has also been involved in various AIDS fundraisers and Meals on Wheels.
The Road to Happiness is Always Under Construction
Gray provides the masses with life advice in her latest book, The Road to Happiness is Always Under Construction. The book was published to celebrate her 75th birthday and takes readers through the events of Gray’s life, covering everything from the stone-cold rejection she received when first trying to achieve her dream of modeling, to her marriage full of emotional abuse and the loss of her sister’s life to breast cancer.
Sarah Hepola
11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Central Presbyterian Church
No stranger to people’s personal lives, Sarah Hepola currently works for salon.com as the personal essays editor, reading about other people’s problems and writing about her own. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian, her interests spanning everything from music to travel and film. She currently resides in East Dallas, and published her first book, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, in June 2015.
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
Hepola found herself too often waking up with a gap in her memory from the night before. When her drinking habits started affecting her professional life and relationships, she realized it was time to give up the thing she thought she needed most: booze. After struggling to grow into her sober life, she eventually came to the realization that creativity and expression are two things she could tap into without the exhilarating effects of booze.
Margaret Atwood photo by Jean Malek. Elizabeth Strout photo by Leonardo Cendamo. Amanda Eyre Ward photo by Cory Ryan. Sloane Crosley photo by Caitlin Mitchell. Mary Helen Specht photo by Erica Nix. Shanna Mahin photo by Betsy and Jeff McCue. Jennine Capó Crucet photo by Alexander Lumans. Margo Jefferson photo by Michael Lionstar. Linda Gray photo by Ryder Sloane. Sarah Hepola photo by Zan Keith.
Women of the Texas Book Festival
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