NOVELS SET ON THE STAGE

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
| Location of Session: Festival Room
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 3:45 pm
| Signing Location: Festival Marketplace

My Schedule

About the Event

What would you do for your art? The new novels by Isa Arsén and Callie Collins ask exactly that. In Arsén’s The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf, two Shakespearian actors enter into a marriage of convenience in the 1950s, and when they venture into a summer performance season all their dark impulses emerge. Collins’s Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is set against the bluesy backdrop of 1970s Austin, following ambitious musicians and the price of fame. These writers will talk about historical fiction, queer history, and performance.

About the Author

Photo Credit: Luke Hill

Isa Arsén

Isa Arsén is a certified bleeding heart and audio engineer based in South Texas, where she lives with her spouse and a comically small dog. Her latest novel is The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf.

Photo Credit: Meg Mulloy

Callie Collins

Callie Collins is a queer writer and editor from Texas. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, and received a Zell Postgraduate Fellowship and a Fiction Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She lives in Austin. Her debut novel is Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine.

Moderator

Calvin Crosby

Calvin Crosby, a Cherokee Nation member, has dedicated over 30 years to fostering community through his bookselling career. He is an owner of The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City and Executive Director of Brain Food Books, a 501(c)(3) organization that provides books to under-recognized communities along the Wasatch Front. He has been honored to serve on several bookselling Boards of Directors, including the Book Industry Charitable Foundation Executive Board.

He received the 2022 Duende-Word BIPOC Leadership Award and served as a juror for the 2023 National Book Award Foundation’s Fiction Category and on the Library of Congress Youth Ambassador Committee. He was honored as the 2023 University of Utah’s Native Excellence Community Partner and holds a Dominican University Business Leadership Certification. He is working on a Dial Fellowship in conjunction with Emerson Collective.

Calvin’s lifelong mission is to establish equity and access to books and reading. Driven to uplift his community, one book at a time, as the owner of the most colonialist-named bookshop, he firmly believes in Land Back, one independent bookshop at a time.