2020 Festival Author Lineup

We were so honored to welcome these authors to Texas Book Festival 2020: Virtual Edition, which took place online October 31 to November 15.

More than two dozen of Kevin J. Anderson’s novels have appeared on national bestseller lists; and he has over 11 million books in print worldwide. His works have been translated into over twenty-two languages, including German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.

Kevin is also the author of three hardcover novels based on the X-Files; all three became international bestsellers, the first of which reached number one on the London Sunday Times bestseller list. Ground Zero was voted “Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995” by the readers of SFX magazine. Ruins hit the New York Times bestseller list, the first X-Files novel ever to do so, and was voted “Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996.”

Kevin’s thriller Ignition, written with Doug Beason, has sold to Universal Studios as a major motion picture. Anderson and Beason’s novels have been nominated for the Nebula Award and the American Physics Society’s “Forum” award. Their other novels include Virtual Destruction, Fallout, and Ill Wind, which has been optioned by ABC TV for a television movie or miniseries. His collaborative works include Artifact (Forge Books; May 2003), a thriller written with F. Paul Wilson, Janet Berliner, and Mathew Costello; and Dune: The Battle of Corrin (Tor Books; August 2004) written with Brian Herbert, Book 3 of their acclaimed Legends of Dune trilogy, and the sequel to the bestsellers Dune: The Butlerian Jihad and Dune: The Machine Crusade.

Kevin’s solo work has garnered wide critical acclaim; for example, Climbing Olympus was voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus Magazine, Resurrection, Inc., was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and his novel Blindfold was a 1996 preliminary Nebula nominee. Anderson has written numerous bestselling comics, including Star Wars and Predator titles for Dark Horse, and X-Files for Topps.

Kevin’s research has taken him to the top of Mount Whitney and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, inside the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, into the Andes Mountains and the Amazon River, inside a Minuteman III missile silo and its underground control bunker, and onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. He’s also been on the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, inside a plutonium plant at Los Alamos, behind the scenes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and out on an Atlas-E rocket launchpad. He also, occasionally, stays home and writes. Kevin and his wife, writer Rebecca Moesta, live in Colorado.

Featured Book

Dune: The Duke of Caladan

Gabi Conti is an author, dating expert, host, writer, and comedian. She went on ten thousand hours’ worth of dates in her twenties, which she writes about in her new book Twenty Guys You Date In Your Twenties. Gabi gained national attention with her article and video for Cosmopolitan, “I Went on 30 Dates In 3 Days.” The video was featured by Daily Mail, and then she appeared on Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, Doctors, 97.1 AMP Radio, and Daily Mail TV.

She currently hosts a daily entertainment news talk show Hollywire News on YouTube, Vizio, and SamsungTV. Gabi has also hosted Street Smarts for BrotherHQ’s and wrote and hosted over 400 episodes of the Elite Daily Show for Verizon’s go90. Gabi performs stand-up and storytelling all over Los Angeles and has appeared on Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, VH1’s Candidly Nicole, and VH1’s The Walk of Shame Shuttle. She has contributed to Hello Giggles, Elite Daily, Brit+Co, and Popsugar. Gabi has worked on Comedy Central’s @Midnight, The Jeselnik Offensive, The Burn and Important Things With Demetri Martin, before pivoting to the digital space after the success of her sketch group Half Day Today! Gabi’s pilot “This One Time @ Camp” was a finalist in Just For Laughs Stand-up and Pitch Contest, which led to her selling her web series There’s No Place Like Home to Elite Daily. Gabi’s other pilot “Ex-Communication” was a finalist in NYTVF.

Featured Book

Twenty Guys You Date In Your Twenties

Catherine Coleman Flowers

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Katherine Sharp Landdeck

Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born to an American father and Japanese mother, and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her new book, American Harvest: God, Country and Farming in the Heartland, follows her journey through seven red agricultural states in the company of evangelical Christian harvesters, and examines the changing role of food, God, science, and race in society.

Mockett’s previous book, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, examines grief against the backdrop of the 2011 Great East Earthquake, and Mockett’s family temple located twenty-five miles from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power reactor. A 2011 Op Ed in The New York Times about 3.11, led to featured participation in the internationally televised NHK Documentary, “Venerating the Departed.” Mockett’s awards include a Fellowship from the US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye was a finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, the Indies Choice for Nonfiction and the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and other honors. Her novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize and the Paterson Prize. Additional work appears in the New York Times, National Geographic, Elle, Glamour, Ploughshares, Agni, and other publications. She received her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in San Francisco. Mockett is part of the core faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington, and a visiting professor at Saint Mary’s MFA program in Moraga, California.

Featured Book

American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

Jarrett Pumphrey (2020)

Jerome Pumphrey (2020)

Julie Schwietert Collazo

Christina Soontornvat (2020)

Nic Stone

Francisco X. Stork

Doug Swanson

Natalia Sylvester (2020)

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi, and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Featured Book

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir