-SESSION CANCELED-JUNETEENTH RODEO with SARAH BIRD

12:15 pm - 1:00 pm
| Location of Session: Salazar Gallery
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 1:15 pm
| Signing Location: Festival Marketplace

My Schedule

About the Event

THIS SESSION HAS BEEN CANCELLED

In the late 1970s, Black communities across East Texas held local rodeos for the talented cowboys and cowgirls who were segregated from the mainstream circuit. In Juneteenth Rodeo, Sarah Bird’s lens puts Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.

About the Author

Photo Credit: Julia Robinson

Sarah Bird

Sarah Bird is the bestselling author of more than a dozen novels and essay collections. She is a storyteller for The Moth; a winner of Meryl Streep’s screenwriting competition, The Writers Lab; a recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters Lifetime Achievement Award; a winner of the American Library Association’s Alex Award; a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame; a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award; and the hologram greeter for the Austin Central Library. Her latest book is Juneteenth Rodeo.

Moderator

Celeste Bedford Walker

A prolific and oft-awarded playwright, Celeste Bedford Walker has recently enjoyed particular renown for her great body of work, receiving the League of Professional Theatre Women’s Lucille Lortel Award. Other honors and awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in drama and performance art, the National Black Theatre Festival’s August Wilson Playwright Award, the Beverly Hills NAACP Theatre Award, the New York AUDELCO award, a BOLD Commission with Houston’s Ensemble theatre and finalist in the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, among others

In 2022, she became the first African American writer to win the highest literary honor in Texas, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, established in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and to recognize distinctive literary achievement, whose “membership includes winners of the Pulitzer Prizes in drama, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as prizes by PEN, fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from dozens of other regional and national institutions.”

In February 2023, Texas A&M University Press published a collection of her work, Sassy Mamas and Other Plays, as part of The Wittliff Collections literary series, with a special exhibition highlighting the acclaimed Houston playwright as one of Texas’ major literary figures.

A member of both the Dramatists Guild and Honor Roll! an advocacy group for playwrights over forty, Walker continues to expand her legacy by writing plays about current issues, social justice, and difficult history.