Events

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ADMISSION
Wittliff Collections events are OPEN TO THE PUBLIC and FREE, unless noted.

DIRECTIONS + PARKING
Click here for VISITOR INFORMATION

ACCOMMODATION
If you require accommodations due to a disability in order to participate,
please call 512.245.2313 at least 24 hours in advance of the event for assistance.

ANNOUNCEMENTS
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VIDEOS
For videos of some of our past events, see the EVENT VIDEOS page or watch on YouTube.
Videos of the Lindsey Literary Series readings can be viewed on the site for Texas State's literary journal, Front Porch.

FALL 2013   

Events being planned include readings and book signings with Natalie Diaz, Etgar Keret, Jennifer Egan, Cristina Garcia, and B.H. Fairchild; several programs on the ladrillería (brickmaking) industry along the border; and receptions with guest speakers for each of our fall exhibitions. Please check back for details.

SPRING 2013

JANUARY 22, 2013, TUESDAY, 6:30 PM
LIFE & DEATH IN THE NORTHERN PASS:
A Conversation with Photographer DOMINIC BRACCO II
Reception | Discussion | Q&A

More haunting than macabre, Dominic Bracco’s photographs of Ciudad Juárez evoke a world where seemingly stark moral boundaries are blurred by the gritty realities of poverty and endemic violence—a chronicle of life and death, of grief and loss, in the most violent city in North America. This event offers faculty, students, and the public at large an opportunity to engage in conversation with an investigator who has seen first hand the impact of America’s illegal drug market on the social, economic, and political life of Mexico, particularly the border region. Co-sponsored by Texas State's Center for the Study of the Southwest, Wittliff Collections, and Department of Sociology, the evening will include a reception, discussion, and Q&A with the photographer.

Life and Death in the Northern Pass, a collection of 30 color images by photojournalist Dominic Bracco II, is now on display at Texas State's Brazos Hall through the end of January 2013. Bracco’s work has been exhibited at galleries in London and Washington D.C. and published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Texas Monthly magazine, among others. In 2011 Bracco was honored with a Eugene Smith fellowship and a Pictures of the Year International Award, and he received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He was also a 2011 finalist for the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, the Michael P. Smith Grant, and the Emerging Photographer Fund grant. He has degrees in journalism and Spanish literature from The University of Texas at Arlington. A founding member of the photography collective Prime, Bracco lives in Mexico City.

FEBRUARY 7, 2013, THURSDAY, 3:30 PM
MIHAELA MOSCALIUC Reading | Book Signing | Q&A
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of Father Dirt, which won the Kinereth Gensler Award, and co-translator of Carmelia Leonte's Death Searches for You a Second Time. Her poems, translations, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Georgia Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, Absinthe, Poetry International, Pleiades, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. In 2011, she was honored with a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Born and raised in Romania, Moscaliuc came to the United States in 1996 to complete her graduate degree. She received her doctorate in American Literature from the University of Maryland and has lectured on Eastern European American immigration literature, Roma/Gypsy culture, the writings of Paul Celan, and translation theory at universities in both the U.S. and in Europe. This Lindsey Literary Series event is co-sponsored by the Burdine Johnson Foundation, and Texas State's Wittliff Collections, Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, and Department of English. Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of the University Bookstore and Barnes & Noble.

FEBRUARY 8, 2013, FRIDAY, 7:30 PM
Mihaela Moscaliuc will also read at Texas State's Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle.

FEBRUARY 12, 2013, TUESDAY, 5:00 PM
POETRY + FICTION READING
Texas State's Master of Fine Art students read from their work in the creative writing program.

FEBRUARY 15, 2013, FRIDAY
10:00 AM – 2:00 PM
HILL COUNTRY MUSIC SCENES Symposium
The Center for Social Inquiry in Texas State’s Department of Sociology presents “Hill Country Music Scenes: Scholarly and Community Development Approaches,” a symposium discussing the important cultural, economic and educational impact of the creative music scenes on our community. Dr. Bryce Merrill, from The Western States Arts Federation, will lead a panel discussion on “Designing Music Scenes: Authenticity and Viability” from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. The panel will consist of Mr. Don Pitts, Music Program Manager for the City of Austin; Mr. Kent Finlay, Founder and Manager of the Cheatham Street Warehouse; Dr. Gary Hartman, Director of Texas State’s Center for Texas Music History; and Mr. John A. Lopez, Coordinator of Latin Music Studies at Texas State. Following a lunch break from 11:30 to 12:30, Dr. David Grazian, from the University of Pennsylvania, will present a keynote address on “Digital Underground: Musical Spaces and Microscenes in the Postindustrial City.”

Support for this event is provided by the University Lecturers Series. Co-sponsors include the Center for the Study of the Southwest, the Center for Texas Music History, and the Multicultural Student Affairs Office at Texas State University-San Marcos.

Attendees are asked to RSVP to register.
Lunch will be provided to registered attendees only. To register, please contact:
Dr. Joseph A. Kotarba, Director, Center for Social Inquiry, Department of Sociology
512-245-8905
jk54@txstate.edu

FEBRUARY 28, 2013, THURSDAY, 3:30 PM
WILLIAM GIRALDI Reading | Book Signing | Q&A
Hailed as “one of our most important young chroniclers of anguish and bliss” for his first novel, Busy Monsters, William Giraldi is the second of five authors presented at the Wittliff Collections this semester by the English department’s creative writing program. Preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom writes that Giraldi’s Busy Monsters is “rammed with life. A kind of elegiac intensity, remarkable for so young a man, pervades its harmonies.” Other reviewers say his prose is “comic writing of the first rank” and that it “wails with the urgency of rock and roll.” Also a critic, and reviewer, William Giraldi is a Senior Editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University and is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review. He has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category of Essays and Criticism, and is also a recipient of a Pushcart Prize. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Dissent, Commentary, The Daily Beast, Georgia Review, Bookforum, Salon, Southern Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, The American Scholar, The New Criterion, Salmagundi, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Twice his work has been listed among “Most Notable Essays” in Best American Essays. Norton published Busy Monsters in 2011. This Lindsey Literary Series event is sponsored by the Burdine Johnson Foundation and Texas State’s Wittliff Collections, Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, and Department of English. Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of the University Bookstore.

MARCH 1, 2013, FRIDAY, 7:30 PM
William Giraldi will also read at Texas State's Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle.

MARCH 5, 2013, TUESDAY, 5:00 PM     —CANCELLED— next MFA reading is APRIL 9
POETRY + FICTION READING
Texas State's Master of Fine Art students read from their work in the creative writing program.

MARCH 21, 2013, THURSDAY, 3:30 PM
CHRISTIAN WIMAN Reading | Book Signing | Q&A
Poet, essayist, and the editor of Poetry, America’s oldest monthly magazine of verse, Christian Wiman is also the author of four books of poetry and two collections of essays. Poetry’s editor since 2003, Wiman will step down at the end of June to join the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. Under his decade-long editorship, Poetry won two prestigious National Magazine Awards, including its first in the general excellence category. Christian Wiman was born in 1966 in West Texas. On his 39th birthday, he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer, which reignited his religious and creative passions.In the New Yorker, poet and critic Dan Chiasson chose Wiman’s Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) as one of the eleven best poetry collections of the year, writing "Every poem seems made to steady and fortify him against mortality." Wiman’s other collections include The Long Home (Copper Canyon, 2007), which won the Nicholas Roerich Prize, Hard Night (2005), Stolen Air, translations of Osip Mendelstam (Ecco, 2012), and the nonfiction collections Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon, 2007) and My Bright Abyss (FSG, 2013). Wiman has also received both the Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships. This Lindsey Literary Series event is co-sponsored by the Burdine Johnson Foundation, and Texas State's Wittliff Collections, Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, and Department of English. Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of the University Bookstore.

MARCH 22, 2013, FRIDAY, 7:30 PM
Christian Wiman will also read at Texas State's Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle.

MARCH 27, 2013, WEDNESDAY, 7:00 PM
WRITING THE STORY OF TEXAS  Panel Discussion | Book Signing
Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southwest.
Click here for more information.

APRIL 4, 2013, THURSDAY, 6:30 PM
GLOBAL ODYSSEY Panel Discussion | Q&A | Book Signing
Staged in conjunction with Texas State's 2012-2013 Common Experience theme, the Wittliff Collections present a conversation with four writers featured in the current literary exhibition, Global Odyssey: From Texas to the World and Back. The writers—all of whom are members of the Texas Institute of Letters—will discuss a variety of global experiences that have inspired their creativity while at the same time underscoring their distinctive heritage as Texans. A Q&A and book signing with all four will follow the discussion; their books will be for sale by the University Bookstore.

Attendees are asked to RSVP to southwesternwriters@txstate.edu.

THE PANEL:

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, a native of Corpus Christi, is the author of Around the Bloc and Mexican Enough. Griest lived and worked in Russia and China as she explored, firsthand, the dissolution of Communism from a uniquely Chicana perspective. She also lived in Mexico while attempting to improve her “Tarzan Lite” Spanish.

Manuel Luis Martinez, a native of San Antonio, is the author of three acclaimed novels and is a professor at Ohio State University. In 2011 he received the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship. Mexico looms large in Martinez’s work, particularly in his novels Crossing and Day of the Dead.

John Phillip Santos of San Antonio is the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar. Santos worked in New York for several years as a television documentary producer before returning to San Antonio and writing a family memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, which became a finalist for the National Book Award.

The panel’s moderator is Carmen Tafolla of San Antonio. In 2012 Tafolla was named the first Poet Laureate of the City of San Antonio. She is the author of numerous books and is considered one of the madrinas (godmothers) of Chicana/o literature. Her most recent collection of stories is The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans.

APRIL 9, 2013, TUESDAY, 3:30 PM
CRISTINA GARCÍA Reading | Book Signing | Q&A
Cristina García is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel, recently published by Scribner. García is the editor of two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. She is also the author of two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox, published in 2008, and a collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, published in 2010. Her recent work, Dreams of Significant Girls, is a young-adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s, and her latest novel, King of Cuba, is forthcoming from Scribner in May. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García is currently serving as the University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State. Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of the University Bookstore.

APRIL 9, 2013, TUESDAY, 5:00 PM
POETRY + FICTION READING
Texas State's Master of Fine Art students read from their work in the creative writing program.

APRIL 11, 2013, THURSDAY, 3:30 – 10:00 PM
BORDER WRITERS / ESCRITORES de la FRONTERA
Literary Symposium

3:30 – 5:15 PM   Panel Discussion + Q&A
6:15 – 6:45 PM   Casual Reception
6:45 – 9:00 PM   Short Readings (seven authors)
9:00 – 10:00 PM  Q&A + Book Signing
Nowhere is the world more connected, more complex, than in the borderlands. This multi-sponsor event highlights the international scene only three hours from San Marcos, Texas, and the Austin-San Antonio corridor—a landscape extremely relevant to students and these communities but often unexplored. Gathering together seven writers who can speak intimately of an area where two countries meet—geographically and culturally—creates the opportunity to highlight the complexities and contradictions of our global, interconnected world. Their stories foster understanding and appreciation for the uniqueness of South Texas, which reflects overlapping Mexican and American cultures, and for both of these cultures in their own right as well. Expected topics range from immigration to religion to economic realities, since these aspects of border life are woven into the fictional and nonfictional work of the participants. Audiences are invited to participate in these deeply important conversations. Books will be for sale during the afternoon event, the reception, and the book signing after the readings.

SPONSORS: This symposium is supported by a Global Odyssey Grant. Co-sponsors include both Kappa Delta Chi, a Latina sorority, and Omega Delta Phi, a multicultural fraternity, as well as Texas State’s English Department, College of Education, Modern Languages Department, College of Applied Arts, Center for the Study of the Southwest, Office of Equity and Access, History Department, College of Health Professions,  College of Liberal Arts, and Wittliff Collections.

PARTICIPANTS include authors who’ve been finalists for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, professional writers, respected academics, and practicing lawyers. They come from across the U.S.—Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Kansas City, and the Rio Grande Valley—but all are connected to the borderlands.

Professor Norma Cantú received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&I at Laredo and Kingsville, respectively, and her doctorate from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She was a senior arts administrator with the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC and was Acting Chair of the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Cantú has published articles on a number or academic subjects as well as poetry and fiction. She has co-edited four books and edited a collection of testimonios by Chicana scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Her award-winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera chronicles her childhood experiences on the border. She edits the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Culture and Traditions book series at The Texas A&M University Press.

Christine Granados was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Her collection of short stories, Brides and Sinners in El Chuco, was published in 2006 by the University of Arizona Press. She has been a Spur Award finalist and winner of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from the Macondo Foundation. Christine’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the Evergreen Review, Callaloo, NPR’s Latino USA, Texas Observer, El Andar, and others. Her work has been anthologized in several college textbooks and anthologies, including the Wittliff Collections’ Hecho en Tejas.

Reyna Grande’s first novel, Across a Hundred Mountains, (Atria, 2006), received a 2010 Latino Books Into Movies Award, a 2007 American Book Award, and the 2006 El Premio Aztlán Literary Award. Her second novel, Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009), was critically acclaimed and received a 2010 International Latino Book Award. The Distance Between Us (Simon & Schuster, 2012), a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Domingo Martinez was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. He was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award in non-fiction. His work has appeared in Epiphany, The New Republic, and in October 2011, he read an adaptation of “The Mimis” on This American Life.

Chuy Ramirez practices law in San Juan, Texas. He grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and attended Pan American University and is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law. There, he served as Articles Editor for the International Law Journal and published a note entitled, “Altering the Policy of Neglect of Undocumented Immigration from South of the Border,” Vol. 18 in 1983. Strawberry Fields is his first fictional work.

Alberto Ramon is a former social worker involved in the war on poverty and with programs for itinerant migrant children from South Texas. He is a criminal defense attorney and the author of the novels On Both Sides of the River and The Mystery of Lawlessness.

Sergio Troncoso was born in El Paso, Texas, and now lives in New York City. He graduated from Harvard College, and studied international relations and philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and the novels The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2012 and won the Southwest Book Award. Troncoso was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters. He is a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Conference.

APRIL 18, 2013, THURSDAY, 3:30 PM
KAREN RUSSELL Reading | Book Signing | Q&A
Karen Russell, a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program, is known for short stories that have been featured in numerous publications and collections. Her short story collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves received great acclaim and wide publication. In 2009, Russell was named a "5 under 35" writer by the National Book Foundation and one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" writers to watch in 2010. Karen Russell is the recipient of the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Berlin Prize and Spring 2012 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Her debut novel Swamplandia! was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the New York Public Library's 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award, and was included in The New York Times' "10 Best Books of 2011."  This Lindsey Literary Series event is co-sponsored by the Burdine Johnson Foundation, and Texas State's Wittliff Collections, Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, and Department of English. Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of the University Bookstore.

April 19, 2013, FRIDAY, 7:30 PM 
Karen Russell will also read at Texas State's Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle.