The Texas Book Festival, the largest book event in Texas and one of the premier literary events in the nation, will be held November 11–12 in and around the State Capitol in downtown Austin. Our authors Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny & translator JD Pluecker, Charles Alcorn, KB Brookins, Christine Byl, Oksana Lutsyshyna, and Ernest McMillan — as well as our poetry editor Sebastián H. Páramo — will all be speaking on panels, and Deep Vellum / Dalkey Archive Press will have a booth at the fair!
Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny received her MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of Coming Out (Epic Press, 2014), The Everything I Have Lost (Cinco Puntos Press, 2020), El Libro de Aisha (Random House, 2020) and Trash (Deep Vellum, 2023). Her novel Todo Eso Es Yo won the National Book Award in Tamaulipas, México in 2015.
JD Pluecker works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Their undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016), Writing with Caca by Luis Felipe Fabre (Green Lantern Press, 2021), and Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press, 2023). JD’s book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press, and in 2019 Lawndale Art Center supported the publication of the artist book, The Unsettlements: Dad. From 2010-2020, they worked as part of the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and from 2015-2020 with the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD edits chapbooks with Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal series, is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant, and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more. More info at www.antenaantena.org.
Where Do I Belong? The Search for Home and Connection
With Cristina García & Rosa Beltrán. Moderated by Adriana Pacheco.
Nov. 11, 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM, Leamos Tent
Charles Alcorn has lived in and written about Texas all his life. A former all-state linebacker, Alcorn founded Splendid Seed Tobacco Company and was a sportswriter and packaged goods copywriter before receiving his PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Houston. Alcorn is the author of the short-story collection Argument Against the Good-Looking Corpse (2011 Texas Review Press). He is currently at work on a second novel, Sharkskin Palace, set during the Austin Chalk Boom/Sexual Revolution of the 1970s behind the mysterious River Cane Curtain on the Coastal Bend of Texas.
Texas Trails: Fictional Adventures Across the Lone Star State
With Jardine Libaire. Moderated by Taylor Bruce.
Nov. 11, 3:30 PM - 4:15 PM, Capitol Extension E2.026
KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. Their chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize. KB’s poems and essays are published in Poets.org, Huffington Post, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. They have earned fellowships from PEN America, Civil Rights Corps, and Lambda Literary among others. KB’s debut memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf) will arrive in 2024, and they are a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellow.
Finding Freedom
With Anastacia-Reneé. Moderated by Amanda Johnston.
Nov. 12, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM, The Contemporary Austin - Rooftop
Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods (Beacon Press, 2013), a book about trail crews, tools, wildness, and labor; it was short-listed for the Willa Award in nonfiction. Her prose has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Sun, Crazyhorse, and Brevity, among other journals and anthologies. A grant recipient from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and winner of the Alaska Literary Award in 2015, Byl has been a fellow at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and writer-in-residence for Fishtrap’s Writer-in-the-Schools program. Christine has worked as a professional trail-builder for more than twenty-five years; she lives with her family in Interior Alaska on the homelands of the Dene. Lookout is her first novel.
A Part of the Whole: Family & Authentic Identity
With Asale Angel-Ajani. Moderated by Sarah Hepola.
Nov. 12, 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM, Capitol Extension E2.010
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, and poet, author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and five books of poetry, the latest of them published in the English translation in 2019 (Persephone Blues, Arrowsmith). For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, she was awarded Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.
Literature in Translation
With Kevin Chen. Moderated by Olga Vilkotskaya.
Nov. 11, 1:30 PM - 2:15 PM, Capitol Extension E2.012
Mr. Ernest McMillan is a veteran human rights activist with a history of working through the 60’s in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and throughout the 80’s with the National Black United Front and the United League of Mississippi. McMillan served as the Chairman of the Dallas SNCC from 1967- 1969.
From the 1960s to Present Day, How Black Resilience Has Shaped American Democracy
With Daniel Black. Moderated by Peniel Joseph.
Nov. 12, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM, C-SPAN Tent
Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023). His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and elsewhere. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and recently a Dobie Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding editor of The Boiler, Poetry Editor for Deep Vellum, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.
Poetry & the Pursuit of the American Dream
With Tim Z. Hernandez. Moderated by ire'ne lara silva.
Nov. 11, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM, Leamos Tent
See you there!