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Andrea Bajani and Claire Vaye Watkins will read from their new novels The Anniversary (translated by Geoffrey Brock) and Yellow Pine, respectively, followed by an on-stage conversation led by professor and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Lacy M. Johnson. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2026/2027 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Andrea Bajani is one of the most recognized and lauded authors of contemporary Italian and European literature. His many novels include If You Kept a Record of Sins, called “astonishing” by The New York Times, and Every Promise, which won the Bagutta Prize, the oldest Italian literary prize. A self-described existential writer, he often examines the personal, philosophical, and political, while confronting the unanswerable. A professor and international writer-in-residence at Rice University, Bajani joins us with his latest novel, The Anniversary, which won the 2025 Strega Prize, one of Europe’s major literary awards. Currently being translated into more than 25 languages, The Anniversary is a subtle yet heartrending portrait of an abusive marriage in patriarchal Italy and a son’s liberating decision to cut contact with his parents. The Times Literary Supplement writes, “Bajani’s prose is sharp and brims with psychological insights . . . Perhaps its most salient feature—in deft translation by Geoffrey Brock—is its skill at depicting alienation . . . Like Albert Camus, Bajani is a poet of estrangement.”
Claire Vaye Watkins has been called “the most riveting voice of the unsalvageable West” (Los Angeles Times). Her debut novel Gold Fame Citrus, inspired by the Californian drought and by the lives of outcasts in the desert, blends climate fiction with environmental history. Born in Bishop, California and raised in the Mojave Desert on the Amargosa River, Watkins is also the author of the novel I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness and the short story collection Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Guggenheim Fellow, Watkins comes to Houston with her newest work Yellow Pine, described by author Megha Majumdar as “an exhilarating novel about a woman in the Mojave desert who wants to be a mother one more time, wants to love freely and arrange her life freely, wants to live outside the maze of money and ads and being sold to, a novel with huge and electric convictions.”
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, and activist, and is author of The Reckonings and The Other Side — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and Trespasses. She is editor, with the designer Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University, where she is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program, and is also the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
