The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Glenn Blake

The most complete collection of Glenn Blake’s luminous short fiction published to date.  “I was born in a land of bayous, raised between rivers,” Glenn Blake writes. “There is a place in Southeast Texas where two rivers meet and become one. There is a long bridge over these waters, and as you drive across, you can look to the south and see where the Old River and the Lost River become the Old and the Lost. You can look out as far as you can see and watch this wide water become the bay.”  These fourteen stories are set in the swamps, bayous, and sloughs of Southeast Texas, a region that is subsiding—sinking inches every year. The characters who inhabit Blake’s haunting landscape—awash in their own worlds, adrift in their own lives—struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams from the encroaching tides.

ABOUT GLENN BLAKE

Glenn Blake has taught in the English Department at Rice University, the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Tyler.  He is the author of Drowned Moon, Return Fire, and The Old and the Lost. His novel, Degüello, is due in December. He has edited Gulf Coast, The Hopkins Review, and Boulevard. He is now serving as the Director of the University of Texas Press at Tyler. In 2000, he was elected Chair of PEN Houston. In 2020, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

ABOUT CLIFF HUDDER

Cliff Hudder received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Houston in 1995, and a PhD in American Literature from Texas A&M University in 2018. He has been an archaeological laborer, a film and video editor, a photographer, an air compressor mechanic, an electrical lineman, and an educator. In addition to articles on regional and American literature, his short stories have appeared in several journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Missouri Review. His work has received the Barthelme and Michener Awards, the Peden Prize, the Short Story Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Ruth Vande Kieft Prize from the Eudora Welty Society. His novella, Splinterville, won the 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award, and his novel, Pretty Enough for You, was named a top-10 Texas favorite for 2015 by the Lone Star Literary Life website. His third book, Sallowsfield, will be released in November by Texas Review Press. He serves as the chair of Psychology and Sociology at Lone Star College-Montgomery in Conroe, Texas. In 2017, Cliff was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.