brittny ray crowell and Nina McConigley will read from their new books respectively, Cord Swell and How to Commit A Postcolonial Murder, followed by an on-stage conversation led by poet and University of Houston Creative Writing Program director Kevin Prufer. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as the closing event of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series and also marks the final Inprint reading hosted by Rich Levy, Inprint’s longtime, outgoing Executive Director, who is retiring after 31 impactful years in the role.
brittny ray crowell is a poet, artist, and assistant professor at Clark Atlanta University. Winner of an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, crowell received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Common, Copper Nickel, The Journal, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and her work as a librettist has been featured as part of the Kennedy Center’s Cartography Project. Cord Swell, crowell’s ambitious and inventive debut poetry collection, is a pilgrimage of poems, stories, voices, and mixed-media collage through the lives of three generations of Black women from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. Nick Flynn calls the book “an altar, a praise song to women…who survive―some as witness, some as memory, some as a recipe for gravy.” A. Van Jordan describes these poems as “heirlooms passed down to us, bolstering strength through every challenge.”
Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which won the PEN/Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and recently received its world premiere. McConigley’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Salon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and a winner of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Nonfiction Prize. How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is McConigley’s bold and fiercely original debut novel, set in 1986 rural Wyoming, about a pair of Indian-American teenage sisters who plot to murder a newly immigrated uncle. At its heart, the tale is a moving story of sisterhood, a playful ode to the 80s, a murder mystery (of sorts), and a powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence. Celeste Ng writes, “I have been waiting for Nina McConigley’s debut novel for years and it’s even better than I could have imagined.”
Kevin Prufer is the 2026 Texas Poet Laureate. His ninth poetry collection, The Fears, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023 and received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His new novel Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024) was declared a “small press gem” by the Los Angeles Times. He is Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where he also curates the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers.
