OBSESSED WITH TEXAS with Writers’ League of Texas

1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
| Location of Session: Launch SA Center
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 3:00 PM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

My Schedule

About the Event

Join Writers’ League of Texas for a conversation about these two new short-story collections. In stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern cities, Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. Encounters with Unexpected Animals takes readers deep into the heart of Bret Anthony Johnston’s home state of Texas, where teenagers search for love, parents grasp at connections with their children, and animals—real or imagined, familiar or unexpected—are reminders of the mystery, danger, and beauty of being alive. These writers will delve into what short stories mean to them and how the form embodies the perspectives of numerous people, capturing emotions amidst it all.

About the Authors

Photo Credit: Nina Subin

Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Remember Me Like This and the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories and is the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, Thrasher Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, he was born and raised in Texas and is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

His latest book is Encounters with Unexpected Animals: Stories.

Photo Credit: Matt Valentine

Carrie R. Moore

Carrie R. Moore is the author of Make Your Way Home, a story collection exploring Black love and longing in the American South. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Oprah Daily, The Sewanee Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, and other publications. She earned her MFA in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Keene Prize for Literature and was the inaugural fellow at the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat. Born in Georgia, she currently resides in Texas with her husband.

Her latest book is Make Your Way Home: Stories, which has been longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Moderator

Sarah Beach, Writers’ League of Texas

Sarah Renee Beach is the Program Director for the Writers’ League of Texas. She has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and The New School, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing. Her poetry chapbook Impact won Sundress Publications’ 2022 Chapbook Contest, and her nonfiction and poetry can be read in The Sewanee Review, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner.