Veterans Writing Collective with Sarah Colby
2025-12-17 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-01-21 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-02-18 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-03-18 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-04-15 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-05-20 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-06-17 18:30 - 20:30, 2026-07-15 18:30 - 20:30 (America/Mexico_City) and 4 more dates | 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 Cyra Sweet Dimitru
2025-12-17 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Chicago)
Join us on Wednesday, December 17th, 2025, via Zoom for a conversation with Cyra Sweet Dimitru, to discuss her new book, Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing After My Brother’s Suicide (Simon & Schuster).

(Virtual Readings Quarterly @ 7pm CST)

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Words Make a Way through Fire is an intimate, courageous memoir of a woman shattered by witnessing her eldest brother’s horrific suicide when she was a teenager. The book traces her creative journey of recovery and healing with poetry as a constant companion.
The primary means of Cyra Dumitru’s healing process, from age sixteen through adulthood, is writing poetry and journaling. During this decades-long journey, Cyra experiences a transcendent, loving presence called Voice who guides her and helps her imagine wholeness. She finds community with others through the sharing of poems. She studies poetry as craft and as medicine—becoming a published poet with multiple books, an award-winning college instructor of poetry writing, and a certified practitioner of poetic medicine who creates spaces where others can heal through poetry.
In Words Make a Way through Fire, Cyra explores the specific medicinal properties of poetry—giving order to interior anxiety, trusting the wisdom within—and invites her brother David to speak through her as he reflects upon his final hours. In doing so, poem by poem, she shifts gradually from being traumatized and feeling haunted to feeling empowered and spiritually expansive.

About the Author
Cyra Sweet Dumitru is a published poet and instructor of poetry, and one of four certified practitioners of poetic medicine in Texas. Her poems have appeared on the walls of City Hall, been spoken on national public radio and in museums, and appeared in city newspapers and national literary journals. Her collections of poems include What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, Remains, and Elder Moon. She offers therapeutic writing circles for adults learning to live with trauma, bereavement, depression, anxiety, and religious trauma. Cyra lives in San Antonio, Texas with her family.

About the Moderator
Natalia Treviño‘s fiction appears in Mirrors Beneath the Earth (Curbstone Press), The Platte Valley Review, and her non-fiction appears in Wising Up Anthologies, Complex Allegiances and Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizens. Her first book of poetry, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, is available from Mongrel Empire Press and most online bookstores. A member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Natalia has been working to increase young adult literacy since 1992 in her teaching career and through programs sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Gemini Ink, and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center.

MOSAIC Poetry Reading & Print Sale
2025-12-18 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Mexico_City) | Contemporary at Blue Star, 116 Blue Star, San Antonio, Texas
We’re celebrating the work of high school students who created original visual art and poetry in this special series of workshops, in partnership with MOSAIC Studio, Contemporary at Blue Star. The celebration will be held at MOSAIC Studio at Contemporary at Blue Star.
Learn more about our Partner Classes Program!

LitMinds Book Club
2026-01-14 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 Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
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The #1 New York Times bestselling novel beloved by millions of readers the world over.
New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
“A vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people [of Afghanistan] have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence—forces that continue to threaten them even today.”—The New York Times Book Review
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
Since its publication in 2003, Kite Runner has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic of contemporary literature, touching millions of readers and launching the career of one of America’s most treasured writers.

About the Author

Khaled Hosseini is one of the most widely read and beloved novelists in the world, with over thirty-eight million copies of his books sold in more than seventy countries. The Kite Runner was a major film and was a Book of the Decade, chosen by The Times, Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. A Thousand Splendid Suns was the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year in 2008. Hosseini is also a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and lives in northern California.
Visit our LitMinds page to see what we’re reading next!

For a Girl Becoming with Joy Harjo
2026-01-30 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Chicago) | Las Palmas Branch Library, 515 Castroville Rd, San Antonio, Texas, 78237
Join us for a special family-friendly reading of For a Girl Becoming with Joy Harjo, featuring illustrator Adriana Garcia and guest poets Laurie Ann Guerrero and Xelena González.
This free community event celebrates poetry and storytelling. Hosted at the Las Palmas Branch Library. All are welcome.

In Conversation with Katie Gutierrez
2026-02-06 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | Maverick Carter House, 119 Taylor St, San Antonio, 78205
Join us for In conversation with Katie Gutierrez at the Maverick Carter House on Friday, February 6 at 7pm presented by UT San Antonio Creative Writing Program in partnership with Gemini Ink.
Katie Gutierrez is the bestselling author of the mystery novel More Than You’ll Ever Know, a Good Morning America Book Club pick and Edgar Award finalist. Her essays and features have appeared in TIME, Texas Highways, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. She has an MFA from Texas State University and lives in San Antonio, Texas. Gutierrez will read from her work and share her approach to writing in conversation with Dr. Kimberly Garza. An audience Q&A and book signing will follow. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided.
Location: The Maverick Carter House, 119 Taylor St., San Antonio 78205

Poets & Coffee
2026-02-21 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Chicago) | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
A morning of poems and conversation
Saturday, February 21 · 10am–12pm · FREE * OPEN TO EVERYONE!
We’ll have the coffee ready—just bring a friend and settle in among fellow poetry lovers.
Explore what’s happening now in the world of contemporary verse. We’ll share a few favorite poems and spotlight contemporary poets who are making waves both on the page and on the stage. This is your chance to join the conversation! Share the poems that have moved you and tell us why poetry matters in your life.
What to Expect
• Fresh coffee and a relaxed, come-as-you-are atmosphere• A guided, informal conversation led by Gemini Ink Executive Director Alexandra van de Kamp• Readings of contemporary poems• Space to listen, reflect, and share (only if you want to)• New poems to take home and simple prompts to spark your own writing• A room full of people who love poetry—or are just getting curious
• No lectures. No pressure. Just good poems, good conversation, and good company.
You’ll leave with a sense of community. Whether you’re a seasoned poet or simply curious, everyone is welcome at our poetic gathering.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
​​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.

LitMinds Book Club
2026-03-11 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 Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel by Zora Neale Hurston.
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“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.”—Zadie Smith
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has, since its 1978 reissue, become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person—no mean feat for a black woman in the ’30s. Janie’s quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

About the Author

Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated author, anthropologist, and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, known for novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God that focused on Black American life and folklore. Educated at Howard University and Barnard College, she was a groundbreaking ethnographer who studied Black culture in the rural South and Caribbean, incorporating her research into her fiction. Despite achieving literary fame, she died in poverty, and her work was largely forgotten until its revival in the 1970s, led by authors like Alice Walker.

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

The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Lauren D. Woods
2026-03-18 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | Online via Zoom
Join us on Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, via Zoom for a conversation with Lauren D. Woods, to discuss her new book, The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe (Autumn House Press).

(Virtual Readings Quarterly @ 7pm CST)

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Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths—joyful, whimsical, even absurd—through the world.
A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left.
In the worlds Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe urges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms.

About the Author

Lauren D. Woods, originally from the Dallas area, now lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she was a 2024-25 Washington, DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for Fiction. Her writing has appeared as a spotlighted story in The Best Small Fictions, as well as in The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Lauren works in consulting and lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a guinea pig. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe is her debut collection.

About the Moderator

Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers, a finalist for the 2019 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award in short fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in journals such as The Southampton Review, World Literature Today, Puerto Del Sol, The Baltimore Review, Passages North, Southern Humanities Review, and Washington Square Review. He is a professor at George Mason University, co-editor of Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature, and co-organizer of the Fox City Lit reading series.

Gemini Ink at the San Antonio Book Festival
2026-04-11 09:00 - 17:00 (America/Chicago) | San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad, San Antonio, Texas, 78205
Join us at our table during the festival. Stop by to learn about upcoming classes, meet our team, and connect with the local writing community.
✨ Mark your calendars, San Antonio!
The San Antonio Book Festival returns on Saturday, April 11 for a full day of stories, ideas, and inspiration. Join us at the Central Library and UT San Antonio Southwest Campus for this FREE, family-friendly celebration of books and the people who love them.
With 110+ authors, engaging panels, kids’ activities, and conversations with bestselling, award-winning writers, there’s something for every reader.
Start planning your day, bring your friends, and get ready to fall in love with reading all over again.
Make your schedule and learn more: sabookfestival.org

Mind Over Mic: A Gemini Ink Storytelling Show & Open Mic
2026-05-07 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | Gemini Ink, 1111 Navarro St, San Antonio, TX, 78205, United States
Open mic sign-up starts at 6 PM.
Thu, May 7, 2026, 6:30-8pm, in-person at Gemini Ink
1111 Navarro St. San Antonio, Texas 78205
Free & Open to the Public
About the Event
Join Gemini Ink and a collection of local storytellers as we share gripping stories of solitary struggles, tiny triumphs, and soothing self-care in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month 2026.
Our featured truth-tellers will include Jen Yáñez-Alaniz, Jonathan Fletcher, Joyous Windrider Jiménez, and Daniel Ramirez. These writers will deliver powerful personal stories in support of Mental Health Awareness Month’s mission to draw attention to the importance of mental health and wellbeing for all.
Following the featured reading, we will host a community open mic. Bring your poems, short stories, and thoughts to share (there will be a 5-minute limit for each reader). Open mic sign-up in person, starting at 6pm. Light refreshments will be served.
We will have a list of community mental health resources available.

Featured Readers
Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025. Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Daniel Ramirez is a longtime educator and writer from San Antonio. He has published nature writing essays in Foliate Oak, Twisted Vine, and you are here journals and nature-based journalism with StateImpact Texas (KUT Austin) and Texas Public Radio. He also writes stories, puppet shows, and poetry; as a teaching artist, he’s taught in multiple genres. He believes that the quest to develop one’s inner creativity parallels the quest to encounter one’s deeper, truer self.
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz is a Chicana Cúelcahén Ndé scholar, poet, and community organizer whose work centers cultural preservation, land-based ceremony, and decolonial epistemologies. Her poetry can be found in There is So Much I Want to Tell You (Mouthfeel Press) and Somos Xicanas (Riot of Roses Publishing House), as well as in various anthologies and journals. She is the author of Surrogate Eater (Alabrava Press). Her current manuscript, Pain Theory: Sweetness Ferments into a Beast, reflects poetically and critically on healing, endurance, and living beyond multiple autoimmune conditions.
Joyous Windrider Jiménez is an educator, artist, and trauma-informed somatic coach. A storyteller at heart, she blends performance and visual elements into stories that articulate her own journey of self-growth and emotional literacy.

Voices of San Anto Storytelling Showcase
2026-05-09 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Chicago) | Schaefer Library, 6322 US Hwy. 87 E., San Antonio, Texas, 78222
Participants gather during a Voices of San Anto bilingual storytelling workshop led by Marisela Barrera in 2025.
Join Gemini Ink and the San Antonio Public Library for an afternoon of live bilingual storytelling featuring local San Antonio storytellers.
Over the past several weeks, community members from across San Antonio have worked with writer and performer Daniel Ramirez to craft original stories rooted in family history, neighborhood memory, music, identity, immigration, friendship, and everyday life in San Antonio. This final celebration brings those stories to the stage in English and Spanish.
Voices of San Anto is a free bilingual storytelling workshop series presented in partnership with the San Antonio Public Library and designed to help local residents shape and share their personal stories in a welcoming community setting.
Event Details
Free and open to the public.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
2–4pm
Schaefer Library
6322 US Hwy 87 E
San Antonio, TX 78222
Presented by Gemini Ink and the San Antonio Public Library.

About Voices of San Anto
Since 2023, Gemini Ink has partnered with the San Antonio Public Library to offer free bilingual storytelling workshops led by local writers and performers including Daniel Ramirez, Marisela Barrera, Eddie Vega, and Chibbi Orduna.
Participants develop original 5–7 minute stories and share them during a live public celebration with family, friends, and the community.

LitMinds Book Club
2026-05-13 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 Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace.
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The “dazzling, exhilarating” (San Francisco Chronicle) debut novel from one of this century’s most groundbreaking writers
Published when David Foster Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990, and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho-babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

About the Author

David Foster Wallace was an American author and professor who wrote novels, essays, and short stories. His work is known for its linguistic skill, inventive structure, and exploration of moral and existential questions. His 1996 novel Infinite Jest, a complex, sprawling dystopian tale, is his best-known work. Wallace’s essays, published in magazines like The Atlantic and Harper’s, are also celebrated.
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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.
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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.

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!
