How strange it is to write that last week it was decided Katherine Anne Porter will be the poster figure for this year’s Texas Writers Month, since she is dead and all, but poster figure she will be and she’s a timely choice; Southwest Texas State and Hays County Preservation Associates are presently raising funds (and 80% of the way there) in their campaign to restore Porter’s childhood home in Kyle to make it the Katherine Anne Porter Home/Museum. The creative writing program at SWT will establish a Creative Writers in Residence Program at the house. Texas Writers Month, in its fifth year, is May… Texas Book Festival organizers are thinking of about five nationally known literary names to bring to the festival this year to bolster crowd sizes but seeing as how the $200,000 they’ll be able to donate to Texas’ libraries is up from the festival’s first year contribution of $127,000, they’re not doing badly at all. Neither is Cyndi Hughes, who last year was the festival’s program director and this year is its director. As far as these appellative matters go, that means Hughes was promoted. Mary Margaret Farabee is still chairman and Laura Bush the honorary chairman… Larry Wright actually will be doing some local bookstore events. On February 6, 7pm, he’ll be discussing and signing Twins at Barnes & Noble Arboretum and on March 28, 3pm, he and UT professor Ricardo Ainslie (The Psychology of Twinship) will be panelists at Borders… On February 2, 11pm, KLRU airs The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, based on UT Press‘ No Color Is My Kind by Houston author Tom Cole… Martin Amis will be discussing his new book Night Train on John Aielli‘s Eklektikos, KUT-FM 90.5, February 2, noon; that evening at 7pm, he’ll read at Book People… UT professor and writer Don Graham will become the president of the Texas Institute of Letters on April 4 at the TIL’s annual meeting… Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gl�ck will read from her poetry collections February 4, 7:30pm at the HRC’s fourth floor auditorium.
Monroe’s Maidie
Debra Monroe is an SWT creative writing and English professor who lives in Wimberley; her third book, Newfangled, is just out. Monroe is a vibrant, humorous woman who won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Violet Crown Award for her two previous books. The protagonist of Newfangled is Maidie Bonasso, whose life and recollections Monroe uses as a springboard for broader themes. She’ll read at Barnes & Noble Guadalupe February 3, 7pm.
This article appears in January 30 • 1998 and January 30 • 1998 (Cover).