POETRY & PAINTINGS

3:45 pm - 4:30 pm
| Location of Session: Salazar Gallery
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 4:45 PM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

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About the Event

Poetry and painting have often gone hand in hand, with a long tradition of artists and poets collaborating. In You Can’t Have It All, poet and former Trinity University Press publisher Barbara Ras and painter and educator Terrell James join forces. Ras’s well-known poem “You Can’t Have It All” has been used to mark occasions, teach classes, and inspire students, and paintings by James elevate the poem to a new level. Prepare for a conversation that thinks about the sensory experience of both poetry and paintings on the page and about the choosing of representational models for art.

About the Authors

Photo Credit: Anna Rucker

Barbara Ras

Barbara Ras is the author of four poetry collections: The Blues of Heaven; The Last Skin, which was named the Best Book of 2010 by the Texas Institute of Letters; One Hidden Stuff; and Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the editor of Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, an anthology of short fiction in translation. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, among others, and has had residencies from the Bellagio Center, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Ucross Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Ras has taught at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and at other workshops nationally and internationally and has served as a Fulbright specialist at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. For 40 years she worked in book publishing, most recently as the founding director of Trinity University Press. She lives in Denver, Colorado. Her latest publication is You Can’t Have It All: A Poem, with paintings by Terrell James.

Photo Credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Terrell James

Terrell James is a painter and educator. She has worked for the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work has been included in nine books, most recently 4 Paintings: Terrell James. She is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies, and fellowships and is widely collected and represented in galleries. She lives in Houston.

Terrell joins the Book Festival to discuss You Can’t Have It All: A Poem, a book that includes her paintings alongside Barbara Ras’s poem.

Moderator

Krystal Jones

Krystal Jones serves as Director of the City of San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture, where she leads strategy and investment supporting one of the nation’s largest municipally funded arts ecosystems. A longtime cultural administrator and advocate for the arts, she has championed public art, equitable funding, and creative workforce development across the city. Known for building strong cross-sector partnerships, Krystal works to position arts and culture as essential drivers of civic identity, economic growth, and community connection in San Antonio.