Texas Book Festival is thrilled to unveil sixteen highly-distinguished authors joining us for the 28th annual Festival, scheduled for November 11–12 in Downtown Austin.
The Festival will feature New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, and political leader Stacey Abrams, PEN/Faulkner award winner Ann Patchett, Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Oprah Book Club Author Abraham Verghese, 2023 National Humanities Medal winner and Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson and many more bestselling and award-winning writers.
The full sneak peek author list includes the following:
Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur and political leader. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first black woman to become a gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history. Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, voting rights, and effective public policy. She has also co-founded successful companies, including a financial services firm, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm, and the media company, Sage Works Productions, Inc.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honoree, the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Saroyan Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book, along with many other honors. Raised in Spring Valley, New York, he now lives in the Bronx.
S. A. Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal, among others. When not writing, he is an avid hiker and chess player.
Elizabeth Crook has published five previous novels, including The Which Way Tree, The Night Journal, which received the Spur Award from Western Writers of America, and Monday, Monday, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014 and winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Crook is also the 2023 Texas Writer Award recipient. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.
Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco.
Vashti Harrison is the #1 New York Times bestselling creator of Little Leaders, Little Dreamers, and Little Legends and the illustrator of Lupita Nyong’o’s Sulwe, Matthew Cherry’s Hair Love, Andrea Beaty’s I Love You Like Yellow, and Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic’s Hello, Star, among others. She earned her BA in studio art and media studies from the University of Virginia and her MFA in film/video from CalArts, where she rekindled a love for drawing and painting. Vashti lives in Brooklyn, New York, and invites you to visit her at vashtiharrison.com or on Instagram and Twitter @vashtiharrison.
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
Ann Patchett is the author of several novels, works of nonfiction, and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including a 2023 National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
Roger Reeves is the author of two poetry collections, King Me and Best Barbarian, and one nonfiction collection, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. Best Barbarian won the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book. His essays have appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Reeves teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
Curtis Sittenfeld is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including Romantic Comedy, which was picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, Rodham, Eligible, Prep, American Wife, and Sisterland, as well as the collection You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. In addition, her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, for which she has also been the guest editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Vanity Fair, and on public radio’s This American Life.
Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises, winner of a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Hillman Prize, and the Helen Bernstein Book Award; and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, LA Times Book Prizes, and Kirkus Prize. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and elsewhere. A 2020-2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Snyder is a Professor of Creative Writing and Journalism at American University and lives in Washington, DC.
Angie Thomas is the author of the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novels The Hate U Give, On the Come Up, and Concrete Rose, as well as Find Your Voice: A Guided Journal for Writing Your Truth. A former teen rapper who holds a BFA in creative writing, Angie was born, raised, and still resides in Mississippi.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway, now in its thirty-fourth paperback printing, Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors, he lives outside Chicago and teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of books including the NBCC Award finalist My Own Country and the New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner. Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016, has received five honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water was chosen as a 2023 Oprah’s Book Club selection.
Jacqueline Woodson received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2023 E. B. White Award, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Her books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award and NAACP Image Award winner Before the Ever After; New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, and a screenwriter. He is the best-selling author of Mr. Texas, The End of October, and ten books of nonfiction, including Going Clear, God Save Texas, and The Looming Tower, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.
The full Festival lineup will include more than 250 impressive literary talents for readers of all ages and will be revealed on September 13th.