Texas Teen Book Festival Announces 2016 Keynotes!

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Texas Teen Book Festival has announced its 2016 keynote speakers! Get excited for bestselling authors Laini Taylor (Strange in the Dreamer) and Leigh Bardugo (Crooked Kingdom)! Check out the full announcement over on the TTBF blog.

Stay tuned for plenty more news to come about this year’s Texas Teen Book Festival! Join the #TTBF mailing list, follow TTBF on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (@txteenbookfest) and mark your calendars for October 1, when we’ll celebrate a great, big day of #YAlit on the campus of St. Edward’s University!

New Books to Check Out in May

A new month means a fresh crop of books on bookstore shelves. Here are a few we’re adding to our To-Be-Read pile this month.

 

the after party

The After Party by Anton DiSclafani (May 17)

DiSclafani is the author of the well-received, book club-ready novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (I will spend the rest of my book career attempting to spell Yonahlossee right on the first try and failing every. single. time.) This new novel is set in Houston in the late 1950s and tells the story of two socialites and good friends in their mid-twenties; one who has it all, the husband and house and adorable kid, and one who has everything else – the attention of any man she wants, the freedom to do as she pleases, and the eyes of Houston society upon her.  There’s glitz, glamour, money and the obsessive, escalating tension between two friends whose relationship has evolved in unforeseen ways.

 

how to be a texan

How To Be A Texan: The Manual by Andrea Valdez (May 3)

With more and more people moving to Texas every day, we are in dire need of a guide to hand the Austin hipster in the pearl snap shirt and clean new cowboy boots who’s still struggling to spell y’all. (It’s okay, it’s okay, Texas wants you anyway.) Andrea Valdez is keeping our roots real by offering step-by-step instructions for how to fly the Texas flag; pronounce Burnet, Bowie, New Braunfels and Waxahachie; choose a belt buckle; get Big Hair; and so much more. This is not a tongue-in-cheek guide, but rather an earnest encyclopedia of how to live in and understand the Lone Star State. (Think Dangerous Book for Girls/Boys, but with instructions for how tailgate and wrangle a rattlesnake.) Of course, you don’t have to be a transplant to enjoy this book. Native Texans will get a kick out of this clear, concise guide, as well. (And we won’t tell anyone if you learn a thing or two yourself.)

 

in the country we love

In the Country We Love: My Family Divided by Diane Guerrero (May 3)

Diane Guerrerro may be familiar to you from her role on the hit show Orange is the New Black. Before she was an actress, she was a fourteen year old girl who arrived home from school one day to discover her family gone. While she was in class, her parents and brother – undocumented immigrants – had been arrested and deported. In her new memoir, Guerrero, who was born in the U. S. and stayed in the country to continue her education, recounts a shocking story that’s all too familiar to the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country. You can listen to her read an excerpt from the book via Entertainment Weekly.

 

eleven hours

Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens (May 3)

This absorbing, slender new literary novel demands to be read in a single sitting. Clear an afternoon and pick up this story of two women; a mother in labor and the hospital nurse who tends to her. Moving back and forth between their perspectives chapter by chapter, Erens reveals the deeper and deeper turns in their personal stories and psychologies. Lore, in labor and alone, comes to terms with the relationships that brought her to this moment. Meanwhile, Franckline, holding memories of the family who exiled her in Haiti, moves with the knowledge of her own delicate pregnancy. Absorbing, riveting and beautiful, this is a novel to read and pass on to friends.

 

imagine me gone

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett (May 3)

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Adam Haslett comes a novel that has received a tremendous amount of pre-pub buzz. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly said, “Haslett’s latest is a sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John’s abiding depression and anxiety….This is a book that tenderly and luminously deals with mental illness and with the life of the mind….In Michael, Haslett has created a most memorable character. This is a hypnotic and haunting novel.” Check out a Poets & Writers podcast interview with Adam right over here. 

 

 

mongrels

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones (May 10)

Texas native (and Texas Book Festival alum) Stephen Graham Jones returns with a dark novel about an adolescent boy raised by an aunt and uncle who live on the fringes of society, and with good reason – they’re werewolves. Jones wrote a great post about his fascination with writing werewolves and shares how this novel was, in its way, a long time coming.

 

And for the kiddos…..

ogbbackyard

Our Great Big Backyard by Laura and Jenna Bush (May 10)

Just in time for road trip season, a delightful new picture book for reluctant young outdoor adventurers, penned by Festival co-founder Laura Bush and her daughter, Jenna, and illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers.  Jane is looking forward to spending her summer plugged into computer games, YouTube videos and movies. When her parents announce a road trip to national parks instead, Jane is more than a little dismayed. As she discovers the wonders of the Everglades and Big Bend National Park, however, Jane’s outlook begins to change. This book commemorates the 100th anniversary of the National Parks Service.

 

There’s plenty more to come this month, including new novels by Don DeLilloRichard Russo, and Louise Erdrich; a funny new debut you’ll want to check out: The Assistants by Camille Perri; and a novel that’s getting a lot of bookseller buzz, set in a version of England where evildoers are recognized by tell-tale emissions of smoke, Smoke by Dan Vyleta. Happy reading!

 

 

Poet Profile: Eileen Myles

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Eileen Myles has been writing poetry, prose, and criticism for the last thirty years. She’s published more than twenty books, but only recently did she find a wider audience after the reissue of Chelsea Girls (an autobiographical account of her explosive adolescence).

A recent profile in the New York Times has a theory why: “The gritty, idealistic outsiders of New York’s creative scenes in the late ’70s — their era’s music, art and general sense of freedom — provided an antidote to the homogeneity of today’s pop culture, and few writers captured that romantic rawness quite like Myles.”

Eileen thinks the main differences is that now we realize that “everybody’s queer — everybody’s wrongly shaped for a culture that requires conformity.” Eileen’s work speaks to that, and has always spoken to that, even when that idea was much less popular than it is today.

About her poetry, Eileen Myles said, “When I’m writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don’t mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness and that’s the birth of the poem. Writing is all performance. Something’s passing through … The performance is us writing what’s using us, remarking upon it.”

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’re printing a poem of Eileen’s below.

 

Our Happiness

was when the
lights were
out

the whole city
in darkness

& we drove north
to our friend’s
yellow apt.
where she had
power & we
could work

later we stayed
in the darkened
apt. you sick
in bed & me
writing ambitiously
by candle light
in thin blue
books

your neighbor had
a generator &
after a while
we had a little
bit of light

I walked the
dog & you
were still
a little bit
sick

we sat on a stoop
one day in the
late afternoon
we had very little
money. enough for
a strong cappuccino
which we shared
sitting there &
suddenly the
city was lit.

 

 

 

2016 Library Grant Recipients Announced

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We announced the winners of our 2015-2016 Texas Public Library Collection Enhancement Grants at the Texas Library Association conference in Houston on Thursday, April 21. Forty-four Texas public libraries received grants totaling more than $100,000.

The Texas Book Festival awards grants to public libraries annually to support collection enhancement. The Festival has donated more than $2.8 million to libraries across Texas since its founding in 1995. Proceeds from the Festival help fund the Texas Book Festival Library Grants. Library Grant applications open in late November after the Festival.

This year the Texas Book Festival granted $100, 137. 29 to 44 public libraries across Texas. Congratulations to the library grant recipients!

  1. Alpine Public Library – $2,500.00
  2. Azle Memorial Library – $1,500.00
  3. Bee Cave Public Library – $2,352.77
  4. Benbrook Public Library – $2,000.00
  5. Blanco County South Library – $2,500.00
  6. Bonham Public Library- $2,500.00
  7. Brownwood Public Library – $2,494.94
  8. Carl and Mary Welhausen Library -$2,500.00
  9. Chambers County Library – $2,500.00
  10. City of Wolfforth Library – $2,498.08
  11. Clara B. Mounce Public Library – $2,465.36
  12. Cleburne Public Library – $2,300.00
  13. Cockrell Hill Public Library – $2,499.99
  14. Crowley Public Library – $2,500.00
  15. Denton Public Library- South Branch – $2,500.00
  16. Dublin Public Library – $2,500.00
  17. Elgin Public Library – $2,498.41
  18. El Paso Public Library Main Branch- $2,500.00
  19. Farmers Branch Manske Library – $670.00
  20. Georgetown Public Library – $2,269.60
  21. Gunter Library and Museum – $2,500.00
  22. Hondo Public Library – $1,181.90
  23. Hutto Public Library – $1,632.35
  24. Justin Community Library – $2,500.00
  25. Kennedale Public Library – $2,064.16
  26. Kyle Public Library – $2,348.29
  27. Lake Travis Community Library -$2,500.00
  28. Lakehills Area Library- $2,500.00
  29. Liberty Hill Public Library District – $2,496.49
  30. Live Oak County Library, Three Rivers Branch – $2,500.00
  31. Marion ISD Community Library – $2,493.79
  32. Mary Lib Saleh Euless Public Library- $2,500.00
  33. Mason Co. M. Beven Eckert Memorial Library – $2,500.00
  34. Natalia Veteran’s Memorial Library – $2,500.00
  35. Real County Public Library-Leakey – $1.000.00
  36. Rhome Public Library – $2,500.00
  37. Sam & Carmena Goss Memorial Branch Library- $1,500.00
  38. Sam Fore, Jr. Public Library – $2,457.74
  39. L.L Temple Memorial Library & Archives – $ 2,413.98
  40. Unger Memorial Library – $2,500.00
  41. Walworth Harrison Public Library – $2,000.00
  42. Waller County Library – $2,500.00
  43. Whitehouse Community Library – $2,499.44
  44. Whitesboro Public Library – $2,500.00