Inprint Poetry Buskers will be writing free personalized poems on the spot at Hermann Park Commons for Commons Public Celebration attendees on requested themes using typewriters. Come by the Inprint table from 9 am – 12 pm to see the local writers in action and walk away with your very own poem.
For more information about Hermann Park’s Commons Public Celebration, click here.
Presented by Baylor College of Medicine’s Humanities Expression and Arts Lab, Hermann Park Conservancy’s Garden and Nature Series, Inprint, and the National Book Foundation.
Join a special event featuring a reading by celebrated author Novuyo Rosa Tshuma in conversation with author/physician and 2024 Science + Literature committee chair Ricardo Nuila (The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine) on writing fiction through a scientific lens. The event will include a book sale facilitated by Kindred Stories and book signing.
Novuyo’s latest novel Digging Stars was a National Book Foundation’s 2024 Science + Literature selection and tells the story of Rosa, a protagonist preoccupied both with space, and with what it means to be human. Her first novel, House of Stone, won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Balcones Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. A former Houstonian, Tshuma earned her PhD at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she was an Inprint Nina and Michael Zilkha/Fondren Foundation Fellow, recipient of Inprint International Student Fellowships, and was a much beloved Inprint Writers Workshop leader. A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, Tshuma has taught graduate fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Emerson College.
Ricardo Nuila is a writer and practicing doctor at Houston’s largest public hospital. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Best American Short Stories. His first book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. In its review, the New York Times notes that Ricardo is a “skillful writer who humanizes his points in meticulous and compassionate detail.” He is the Director of the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) at Baylor College of Medicine.
ABOUT SCIENCE + LITERATURE
Science + Literature identifies three books annually, across genres, that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology, and highlights the diversity of voices in contemporary science and technology writing. Science + Literature is made possible by the Sloan Foundation. Read more about the Science + Literature program on the National Book Foundation’s website.
Free and open to the public, this reading will take place outdoors on the east side of the museum
Join Inprint for a celebratory reading of the 2024 Inprint Prize Winners. This spring, Inprint awarded 10 prizes ranging from $1,000 – $10,000 to nine students studying creative writing at the University of Houston and one undergraduate at Rice University. The winners, selected by outside judges, will give short readings from their prize-winning works. Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy will give opening remarks and Inprint Board Member Ron Restrepo will make a toast to the winners.
The event will be part of the Menil’s Neighborhood Community Day. Earlier that afternoon, the Inprint Poetry Buskers will be on-site writing free poems for Community Day attendees. For the full schedule of the Menil’s Neighborhood Community Day events, click here.
Inprint has been proud to support some of the world’s top emerging writers through annual fellowships and juried prizes for graduate students at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and an annual prize for an undergraduate at Rice University. This year alone Inprint has provided $201,500 in direct support to these students, and since 1983, Inprint’s support of 600+ emerging writers has totaled more than $4.5 million. Recipients of these fellowships and prizes come from all parts of the world and have gone on to impact our local and national communities through teaching, writing, publishing, and more.
2024 Inprint Prizewinners:
Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Nonfiction: Nick Almeida’s stories and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Almeida, a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where he edited Bat City Review. His chapbook, Masterplans, was selected by Steve Almond as grand prize winner of the inaugural Masters Review Chapbook Open in fiction, and is available now.
Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry: Jari Bradley (they/them) is a San Francisco native. They are the recipient of an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship, an Inprint Donald Barthelme Poetry Prize recipient, and a Cave Canem fellow. Their poems have been published in Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets (Poem-A Day), and elsewhere. They are currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston and a Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast Journal.
Inprint Marion Barthelme Gulf Coast Prize: Leisa Loan is a poet, editor, translator, and educator from Boston, MA. She is pursuing a PhD in Critical Poetics at the University of Houston where she is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. She currently serves as the Digital Editor for Gulf Coast.
Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction: Reese Lopez is a writer and musician from Houston, Texas. He is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston, where he is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow and the winner of an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction. He is currently at work on a novel.
Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing at Rice University: Hadley Medlock is a writer of nonfiction and poetry from small-town Arkansas. She is currently a senior at Rice University studying English & Creative Writing. Hadley also serves as the Arts and Entertainment Editor for Rice’s newspaper, The Thresher, and a nonfiction section editor for The Rice Review, a campus literary magazine. Hadley’s work tends to revolve around themes of environment, nature, home, place, and love, and she plans to continue this writing — no matter where she ends up after her impending graduation.
Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction: Kelan Nee is a poet and carpenter from Massachusetts. He is the winner of prizes from The Academy of American Poets, Adroit, and the Inprint foundation. His work has been published by Poetry Magazine, 32 Poems, The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry: Bevin O’Connor is a poet and educator from Southern California and received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the winner of the Prairie Lights Donald Justice Poetry Contest and the Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize. Bevin has taught writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California. A 2022 finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Bear Review, Annulet, Palette Poetry, Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Poetry at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Nina and Michael Zilkha Fellowship recipient and serves as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast magazine.
Inprint Joan & Stanford Alexander Prize in Fiction: Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Biz Rasich is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow and MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Houston. Prior to starting her MFA, she earned her BA in Mathematical Economic Analysis from Rice University and spent several years at the University of Chicago working on press strategy and research for a book about gun violence. She currently serves as a fiction editor at Gulf Coast and a program associate at Writers in the Schools. Her work has previously appeared in R2, Prairie Margins, and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing: Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokisas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX), as an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor fellow at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing and Literature PhD program and is a recipient of the 2024 Inprint Marion Barthelme prize in Creative Writing. The author of the poetry collection Particles of a Stranger Light (Veliz Books, 2023) and co-editor of Tom Postell: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Unsung Masters, 2024), Anthony’s poetry has appeared in guesthouse, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Oversound, Texas Review, Zocalo Public Square, the anthology In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), and elsewhere.
Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry: Mathew Weitman’s poetry appears or is forthcoming Bennington Review, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Poetry, and is a two time Pushcart nominee. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at the University of Houston where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He also teaches creative writing at the Harris County Jail.
Special thanks to Joan and the late Stanford Alexander, The Friends of Marion Barthelme, Nina and Michael Zilkha, and the Inprint Board of Directors, who make these prizes possible. Inprint also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
The Inprint Poetry Buskers will be on-site writing free poems for Menil Neighborhood Community Day. Inprint Buskers will be writing up until the celebratory reading of the 2024 Inprint Prize Winners at 4 pm.
This spring, Inprint awarded 10 prizes ranging from $1,000 – $10,000 to nine students studying creative writing at the University of Houston and one undergraduate at Rice University. The winners, selected by outside judges, will give short readings from their prize-winning works. Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy will give opening remarks and Inprint Board Member Ron Restrepo will make a toast to the winners.
For the full schedule of the Menil’s Neighborhood Community Day events, click here.
Inprint Poetry Buskers will be writing free personalized poems on the spot for Earth Day Festival attendees on requested themes using typewriters. Come by the Inprint table from 10:30 am – 1:30 pm to see the local writers in action and walk away with your very own poem.
For more information about Hope Farms and the Earth Day Festival, click here.
DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of Tommy Orange live event as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Tommy Orange will read from his new novel Wandering Stars, followed by an on-stage conversation with celebrated author and University of Houston faculty member Brenda Peynado. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
TOMMY ORANGE’s first novel There There was “an astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood) that “places Native American voices front and center” (NPR). Featuring the stories of 12 Native Americans all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, There There “has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation” (The New York Times). There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the American Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Orange will read from and talk about his highly anticipated new novel Wandering Stars, which traces the dark history of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, the founding of the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in 1879, and the 2018 shooting of Orvil Redfeather in There There. According to Orange’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Wandering Stars is “an utterly gripping story of history, legacy, and family in which all of Tommy’s prodigious gifts as a storyteller are on full display.” His editor adds, “Tommy Orange has returned with an unforgettably powerful multigenerational saga about what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a major achievement by one of the great writers of our time.”
BRENDA PEYNADO’s genre-bending short story collection, THE ROCK EATERS—featuring Latina girlhood, basement ghosts, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature’s best books of 2021. She teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Tommy Orange will read from his new novel Wandering Stars, followed by an on-stage conversation with celebrated author and University of Houston faculty member Brenda Peynado. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
TOMMY ORANGE’s first novel There There was “an astonishing literary debut” (Margaret Atwood) that “places Native American voices front and center” (NPR). Featuring the stories of 12 Native Americans all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, There There “has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation” (The New York Times). There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the American Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Orange will read from and talk about his highly anticipated new novel Wandering Stars, which traces the dark history of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, the founding of the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in 1879, and the 2018 shooting of Orvil Redfeather in There There. The New York Times calls Wandering Stars “a towering achievement,” and NPR describes it as “an eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the massacre, dislocation, and forced assimilation of Native Americans [that] is also a heartfelt paean to the importance of family and of ancestors’ stories in recovering a sense of belonging and identity…Wandering Stars more than fulfills the promise of There There.”
BRENDA PEYNADO’s genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring Latina girlhood, basement ghosts, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—was named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature. Her novella, Time’s Agent—about a disgraced archeologist searching for the last Taino tribe in pocket universes displaced by time, and her last chance to redeem herself to her wife, the world, and the robot dog that holds her daughter’s consciousness—is out in August. She teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
This Inprint Book Club meeting will take place via Zoom. The Zoom link will be the same for every meeting and will be provided in your Eventbrite email receipt (scroll down to the Additional Information section).
On March 24, 2024 the Inprint Book Club will discuss Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, who will appear as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series on Monday, January 29, 2024. Visit brazosbookstore.com to order your copy of Akbar’s debut novel.
Inprint Book Club meetings are free and open to the public and are facilitated by experienced book club leader Torie Ludwin. The full schedule of Inprint Book Club meetings for 2023/2024 season appears on the main Inprint Book Club webpage, which you can access by, clicking here.
If you have any further questions, please email info@inprint.org.
Como parte de la serie Escritores en la casa, les invitamos a una noche de lectura el 22 de marzo a las 7:30 pm con el autor Julián Herbert.
La lectura es gratis y está abierta al público. Los libros de la autora estarán a la venta durante el evento.
Julián Herbert (Acapulco, México, 1971) es autor de los libros de poemas El nombre de esta casa, La resistencia, Kubla Khan, Pastilla camaleón y Álbum Iscariote; de las novelas Un mundo infiel y Canción de tumba; de la crónica histórica novelada La casa del dolor ajeno; de los libros de cuentos Cocaína (manual del usuario) y Tráiganme la cabeza de Quentin Tarantino; y del libro de crónicas Ahora imagino cosas, entre otras obras. Obtuvo el Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen, el Premio Nacional de Cuento Juan José Arreola, el Premio Nacional de Cuento Agustín Yáñez, el Premio Jaén de Novela, el Premio Iberoamericano de novela Elena Poniatowska, El MacGinnis Ritchie Award, la beca Borchard Foundation y el Premio Nacional de Poesía Ramón López Velarde. Algunos de sus libros están traducidos al inglés, francés, portugués, italiano, alemán y turco. Escribe para medios audiovisuales, es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte y es vocalista de Los Tigres de Borges.
Roberto Tejada
es autor de los poemarios Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), Todo en el ahora (2015), Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010) y Mirrors for Gold (2006). Sus libros sobre arte y fotografía incluyen National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009), Celia Álvarez Muñoz (2009) y Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019), ensayos sobre la historia y su imagen en las Américas. Ha sido premiado con una beca Guggenheim (2021) y sirve de catedrático en la Universidad de Houston (Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor) donde forma parte de la facultad en Escritura Creativa e Historia del Arte.
Esta serie de lecturas es posible gracias a la Rita Mallett Blasser Foundation.
DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of Clint Smith & Patricia Smith live event as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Clint Smith and Patricia Smith will read from their recent poetry collections Above Ground and Unshuttered, followed by an on-stage conversation with Houston Poet Laureate Aris Kian. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2023/2024 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
CLINT SMITH’s 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award winning How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America – “merging memoir, travelogue, and history” (The New York Review of Books) – was a #1 New York Times bestseller, received the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. His debut poetry collection Counting Descent won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His latest collection Above Ground was named a “Most Anticipated Book of 2023” by Time, The Millions, and Elle, and a “Best Poetry Book of 2023” by Book Riot. Monica Youn says his poems “make palpable… the contingent boundaries of love and loss, past and present, sanctuary and violence, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ With inextinguishable generosity and abundant wisdom, he shows us the linkages that both bind and divide us—as family, as community, as nation, as world.” A staff writer at The Atlantic, Clint Smith’s writing has also been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.
PATRICIA SMITH – poet, teacher, and performance artist – is, according to Terrance Hayes, “a storm of beautiful, frightening talent.” Her eight poetry collections include Incendiary Art, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She is a winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, making her the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She joins us to read from and talk about her new collection Unshuttered, which, with her dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form, reanimates a collection of 19th century photographs of Black men, women, and children. As Gregory Orr writes, “Her poems … zip along the textured surface of these worlds and plunge to the soul-depths of the people who inhabit them. And we, her spellbound audience, follow in her sonic wake, grateful to be part of stories so alive with detail and urgent with anguish and purpose.”
ARIS KIAN is a Houston enthusiast and student of abolitionists. Her poems are published with Button Poetry, West Branch, Obsidian Lit, The West Review and elsewhere. She ranks #2 in the 2023 Womxn of the World Poetry Slam and is the 2023-2025 Houston Poet Laureate. She received her MFA from the University of Houston as an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow where she also was awarded the 2022 Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing. Aris currently serves as the Narrative Change & Media Manager at Houston in Action.
