Inprint Houston announced the lineup for its Margaret Root Brown Reading Series for 2019-2020. Authors visiting Houston to read from their latest works include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Colson Whitehead, Louise Erdrich, and Colum McCann.
Whitehead will kick off the series’ season on September 16. He’ll stop in Houston on his tour for The Nickel Boys, his ninth novel, which is being described as a companion piece to The Underground Railroad, his 2016 novel that won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. According to the Houston Chronicle, Whitehead began work on The Nickel Boys after reading about the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, an institution in Florida with a dark and dubious history. Whitehead used the reform school as inspiration for his Nickel Academy in a tale about Jim Crow-era Florida.
Coates won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, a letter in book form written to his son about growing up black in America. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Coates has largely worked in nonfiction prior to the forthcoming publication of The Water Dancer, his first novel, due in September. He’ll read in Houston October 29.
Also appearing this season:
Elizabeth Gilbert, who just published her novel City of Girls. She is perhaps best known for her spiritual travel memoir, Eat Pray Love. She reads in Houston November 11.
Carmen Maria Machado goes to Houston January 27, 2020, with her new memoir, In the Dream House. Her collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, was a National Book Award finalist two years ago.
Louise Erdrich has published novels, short stories, poetry, children’s books, and essays in a distinguished career that spans forty years. She reads in Houston on March 9.
Inprint brings poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Natalie Diaz on March 23. Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel reads on April 27 with Irish novelist Colum McCann to close the 2019-2020 season.
Season tickets will go on sale in the next few weeks, according to Inprint executive director Rich Levy.
