Texas Book Festival Announces Omar Epps for 2022 Lineup

Award-winning actor Omar Epps (seen here in USA Network's Shooter) will bring his debut fiction novel, Nubia: The Awakening, to this year's Texas Book Festival (Courtesy of USA Networks)

The Texas Book Festival has just announced the first 15 authors for its 2022 festival this fall, Nov. 5-6, in Downtown Austin. Among those names is star of House, Shooter and This Is Us Omar Epps, who will present an early look at his debut novel, Nubia: The Awakening.

A Screen Actors Guild Award and nine-time NAACP Image Award winner, and author of the autobiographical From Fatherless to Fatherhood, Epps co-authored the Afrofuturist fantasy with Clarence A. Haynes (The Legacy of Jim Crow), and the festival will be a first look at the book before its publication on Nov. 8.

The event will be hosted fully in person after having it in hybrid format for the last two years. “Virtual programming provided us, and continues to provide, creative opportunities, yet nothing quite matches an author visiting Austin once more,” TBF literary director Matthew Patin said. “In pre-COVID times we took a physical appearance for a given, but now it feels that much more valuable and important. And the 15 names here are only a fraction of what’s to come.”

• Angie Cruz, Good Morning America Book Club Pick author and Women’s Prize finalist, will also attend the event to present her new work, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water. Cruz’s novel is about a woman who evaluates her life after losing her job unexpectedly amid the Great Recession.

• Author of 73 New York Times bestsellers and a native Texan, Sandra Brown will present her latest, Overkill, about a former NFL superstar juggling a life-or-death decision while struggling with a crisis of conscience.

• Pulitzer Prize finalist and biologist David George Haskell will bring Sounds Wild and Broken, where he explores the auditory wonders of the animal kingdom and discusses their endangerment.

• Michaela Goade, New York Times bestselling author and illustrator for children’s novels, will present Berry Song, a picture book where a grandmother and her granddaughter deepen their connection with the Earth.

• The festival will include nonfiction writers such as Vishwesh Bhatt, who will present I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes From a Southern Chef, and James Kirchick, who wrote Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.

• Poetry writers like Sandra Cisneros, presenting Woman Without Shame, and Roger Reeves (Best Barbarian) will also attend the event.

A plethora of fiction writers will also be featured, including Erin Entrada Kelly (Those Kids From Fawn Creek), Sidik Fofana (Stories From the Tenants Downstairs), Xochitl Gonzalez (Olga Dies Dreaming), Elizabeth McCracken with The Hero of This Book, Matt de la Peña (Patchwork), and Mary Laura Philpott (Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives).

The authors attending will present their new novels ranging among a plethora of genres and age groups. In addition to the 15 featured authors, Texas Book Festival will release its full list of writers in September. Lois Kim, TBF’s executive director, said, “We hope all Texans, young and old, newly Texan or seventh generation, are marking their calendars to join us for an epic literary weekend.”