San Antonio festival to feature 100 authors
The 11th annual San Antonio Book Festival’s next month will feature 100 authors, including Jane Smiley, Rebecca Makkai, Kiese Laymon and Sandra Cisneros.
“We have National Book Award finalists, we have Pulitzer winners, Macarthur (Fellowship) geniuses,” said Anna Dobben, who is the festival’s new literary director. “I’m really excited that Kiese Laymon, who is a 2022 Macarthur genius fellow, is joining us. Matthew Desmond, who won the Pulitzer for his book ‘Evicted.’ is joining us for ‘Poverty, by America,’ which is about wealth inequality . ... And there are amazing fiction writers coming.”
The festival takes place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 15 at the Central Library and the UTSA Southwest Campus. It will include author talks, panel discussions, readings, book signings and sales, activities for teens and children and food trucks.
Admission is free.
The library has been undergoing renovations, but festival organizers have been told that it will be ready by the April 15, Dobben said.
A new festival addition aimed at those 18 and up debuts the night before. Lit Happens, which runs from 6-9 p.m. April 14, will begin with a poetry activation by San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson and Jose Olivarez at La Zona, followed by an edition of
“Worth Repeating,” Texas Public Radio’s storytelling series, presented at TPR’S Carlos Alvarez Theater.
“Worth Repeating” will feature several writers participating in the festival, including Mahogany L. Browne and Stephen Graham Jones.
The evening will end with a Literary Death Match focused on writers with Texas connections, including V. Castro and Rubén Degollado, at Legacy
Park.
The fiction lineup for the festival includes Smiley, who will be talking about “A Dangerous Business,” a feminist Western; Geraldine Brooks, who will discuss “Horse,” a time-traveling novel inspired by a reallife thoroughbred; Makkai, whose “I Have Some Questions for You” is about a professor and podcaster forced to revisit the murder of her boarding school roommate when she returns to teach a class; Armando Lucas Correa, whose latest book “The Night Travelers” follows four women in different times as they pursue self discovery; and Marytza K. Rubio, whose short fiction collection “Maria, Maria” was long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction.
Besides Desmond and Laymon, who will be discussing his memoir “Heavy,” the non-fiction writers include Jeff Guinn, whose new book is “Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage”; Mary Beth Rogers, whose new memoir is “Hope and Hard Truth: A Life in Texas Politics”;
Jenny Odell, whose book “Saving Time” came out this week; and Ricardo Nuila, who will talk about “The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine.”
The YA lineup includes award-winning San Antonio writers Jonny Garza Villa, who will talk about their second book, “Ander and Santi Were Here,” following the romance that blooms between a nonbinary teen and a shy waiter; and Marcia Argueta Mickelson, who will be talking about “The Weight of Everything,” which is about a girl coping with the death of her mother. Other YA writers include Adam Silvera, who will talk about “The First to Die at the End,” the prequel to his bestseller “They Both Die at the End”; and Melissa de la Cruz, who will talk about “Snow and Poison,” her spin on the Snow White story.
Cisneros will be part of the poetry contingent, talking about her collection “Women Without Shame/ Mujer sin vergüenza.”