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.