In Lawrence Wright’s Mr. Texas, Sonny Lamb, a rancher-turned-politician tries to balance his morals and his marriage with an increasingly volatile career. Elizabeth Crook’s The Madstone follows an unlikely group of travelers in this literary epic of Texas spanning from the Hill Country to the Gulf Coast. Two of the most revered and acclaimed Texas literary talents working today will take the mainstage to discuss writing, history, and the Lone Star State.
Photo Credit: Charla Wood
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. She received the Texas Writer Award in 2023. Her most recent novel is The Madstone. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.
Photo Credit: Kenny Braun
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, and a screenwriter. He is the bestselling author of the novel The End of October and 10 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. His latest novel is Mr Texas.
Stephen Harrigan’s most recent books are Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas (University of Texas Press, 2019) and the novel The Leopard is Loose (Knopf, 2022). In April of 2025, Knopf will publish his latest work, Sorrowful Mysteries: the Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century. Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly.
