Gemini Ink

Poetry Crush: A Pride Month Literary Event
2026-06-18 18:30 - 20:30 (America/Chicago) | Coates Chapel – UTSA Southwest Campus, 300 Augusta St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Join Gemini Ink as we celebrate Pride Month 2026 with a lovestruck literary event! Poetry Crush invites generations of queer poets to read their own work and the works of their poetry crushes. Because poetry is our love language, we’ll reflect on lovesick lessons from the past and present, and imagine a liberated future.
Featured artists will include Dee Lalo Garcia, Lace Garcia, Marcela Hernandez, Barbie Huerta, and Debra Munoz-Bratina.
We’ll have writing prompts available for anyone who feels inspired to write. Bring a poem by your favorite queer author to read during the community open mic. We’ll end the evening with a dance party.
We’ll have plenty of time to mix and mingle, as we rock the chaotic sounds of DJ Mexistenialism. Light refreshments will be served. We’ll end the evening with a dance party!
This event is designed to introduce our community to emerging queer authors and to celebrate queer writers in a fun, sober space.

LitMinds Book Club: The Safekeep
2026-07-08 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Join us for the LitMinds Book Club at Gemini Ink. We’re reading The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
Register for the Book Club

A house is a precious thing…
It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.
Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.
Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is “a brave and thrilling debut about facing up to the truth of history, and to one’s own desires” (The Guardian).

About the Author

Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank”, has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. The Safekeep is her debut novel and was acquired in hotly-contested nine-way auctions in both the UK and the US. Rights have sold in a further twelve countries.
Visit our LitMinds page to see what we’re reading next!

Poets & Coffee with Alexandra van de Kamp
2026-07-11 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Mexico_City) | Gemini Ink
Coffee. Poetry. Conversation.
Join Alexandra van de Kamp for an informal gathering focused on the poems and poets shaping today’s literary landscape.
Come listen, share, and connect.
You’ll leave with new poems to read and prompts to keep writing.

​​Alexandra van de Kamp is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. Her third book of poems, Ricochet Script, was published by Next Page Press in 2022. ​​Her previous full-length collections include: Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books 2010). She has also published several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, The Texas Observer, and Denver Quarterly.

Veterans Writing Collective with Sarah Colby
2026-07-15 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-08-19 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-09-16 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-10-21 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-11-18 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-12-16 18:30 - 20:30 (America/Mexico_City) | Online via Zoom
The Veteran’s Writing Collective (VWC) encourages the art of writing in a workshop environment where participants are offered honest, positive, and constructive peer-to-peer and mentor feedback. The workshop is open to all active-duty military, veterans, retirees, and their immediate family members. Writers of all levels working in all genres are welcome.
The VWC meets monthly online via Zoom.
If you would like an invitation to this class, send an email to veteranscollective@geminiink.org

Sarah Colby was born in northern New Mexico and raised in the Rocky Mountains. She is married to a retired Army Chaplain and is mother to a son in the Navy. Sarah has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and an exuberant interest in making the ordinary luminous. Her war-time experiences have motivated her to be a voice for the mostly untold stories of families and loved ones during these years of protracted conflict. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about her experiences as a military family member.

The Big Texas Author Talk Featuring Deb Olin Unferth
2026-08-19 07:00 - 20:30 (America/Chicago) | Online via Zoom
Join us on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, via Zoom for a conversation with Deb Olin Unferth, to discuss her new book, Earth 7: A Novel (Graywolf Press).

(Virtual Readings Quarterly @ 7pm CST)

RSVP
Deb Olin Unferth’s latest novel, Earth 7, is a bold and imaginative work of climate fiction that explores love, survival, and what remains of humanity on a nearly uninhabitable planet. As Earth sits on the brink, two unlikely figures—a woman raised in an ocean pod and another who may be a robot—form a connection in a world where some have fled to Mars and others seek digital immortality. At once poetic, strange, and deeply human, Earth 7 moves from the vast edges of the cosmos to the microscopic, asking urgent questions about consciousness, technology, and what it means to endure.

About the Author
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s.

About the Moderator
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in the South Texas borderlands. He is the author of the collections Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and Valleyesque, along with the novels Tears of the Trufflepig and Brother Brontë, which was one of Kirkus’ Best of Fiction 2025 and longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Open Writers’ Lab Reading & Community Open Mic
2026-08-20 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Join Gemini Ink as we celebrate the literary artistry of our Open Writers’ Lab members with a community reading and open mic.

LitMinds Book Club: Art Above Everything
2026-09-09 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Join us as we read Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

A new kind of travel writing.
— Booklist
…a potent testament to the value of pursuing one’s passion.
— Publishers Weekly
A global exploration of what it means to choose a creative life.
All artists struggle. But women are especially pushed to give up their creative ambitions, from societal disapproval against “selfishness” to the pressure (or desire) for children and economic stability. Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie Elizondo Griest wondered if constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else was leading her to fulfillment or regret. After a brutal break-up and narrowly surviving a health crisis in her early 40s, she turned to other women for their perspectives on that haunting question: is art enough?
Art Above Everything documents her travels to 10 nations—from Cuba to Iceland; Rwanda to Qatar—where she meets with legendary painters, poets, actors, dancers, and musicians who talk intimately about their art, both what it gifts them and what it costs them. Collectively, these artists speak dozens of languages and worship a spectrum of faiths, but their compulsions to create despite financial hardship, misogyny, sexual violence, and family ostracization are wholly akin. Bold and inspiring, Art Above Everything illuminates the ways we can wield creativity as a vitalizing force.

About the Author

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas/Mexico borderlands and the author of six books, including Around the Bloc, Mexican Enough, All the Agents and Saints, and Art Above Everything. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, VQR, The Believer, BBC, Orion, Lit Hub, and Oxford American, and has earned a Margolis Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, an International Latino Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes.
She is currently Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She has traveled to 50 countries and 49 states, is a cancer survivor now in remission, and recently endowed Testimonios Fronterizos, a research grant for borderlands student journalists at the University of Texas at Austin.

Visit our LitMinds page to see what we’re reading next!
