(Virtual Readings Quarterly @ 7pm CST; RSVP link coming)
Each month, we feature one Texas author in conversation with another. We offer a vast array of storytellers who represent the spirit of the Lone Star State and continue to keep us on the literary map. In the past, we’ve featured novelists such as Kathleen Kent, Marisol Cortez, Joe Lansdale, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho and Texas poet laureates such as Carmen Tafolla, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Jenny Brown, and Emmy Pérez.
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)
RSVP
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.
See some of our past Big Texas Author Talks (formerly The Big Texas Read) at our YouTube Channel.
UPCOMING 2025 AUTHORS AND TITLES
Mar 18, Lauren D. Woods
PREVIOUS AUTHORS AND TITLES
Cyra Dumitru, Words Make a Way Through Fire
Joaquín Zihuatanejo, Occupy Whiteness
Amanda Churchill, The Turtle House
Melissa Studdard, Dear Selection Committee
Octavio Quintanilla, The Impossible Hours
Kimberly Garza, The Last Karankawas
Carmen Calatayud, This Tangled Body
Anel Flores, Cortinas de lluvia/Curtains of Rain
Joshua Robbins, Eschatology in Crayon Wax
Ayokunle Falomo, Autobiomythography of
Sasha West, How to Abandon Ship
Ramona Reeves, It Falls Gently All Around
Alex Temblador, Writing an Identity Not Your Own: A Guide for Creative Writers
Glenn Blake, The Old and the Lost: Collected Stories
Cyrus Cassells, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
Jason Stone, The Beauty of the Days Gone By
Mag Gabbert, Sex Depression Animals
Rudy Ruiz, Valley of Shadows
Carmen Tafolla, Warrior Girl
Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know
Thomas H. McNeely, Pictures of the Shark
Rubén Degollado, The Family Izquierdo
Jehanne Dubrow, Taste: A Book of Small Bites
Richard Z. Santos, Trust Me
Andrew Porter, The Disappeared
Steve Adams, Remember This
Leticia Urieta, Las Criaturas
Vincent Cooper, Zarzamora
Allison Hedge Coke, Look At This Blue
Tomás Q. Morín, Let Me Count the Ways
Daniel Peña, Bang
Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau: A Novel
Carmen Tafolla and illustrator Regina Moya, The Last Butterfly
Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake
Alexandra van de Kamp, Ricochet Script
Wondra Chang, Sonju
Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven
Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
Marisol Cortez, Luz At Midnight
Sergio Troncoso, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
Edward Vidaurre, Pandemia & Other Poems
Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
Sherry Kafka Wagner, Hannah Jackson
Nan Cuba, Body and Bread
Cliff Hudder, Pretty Enough for You
Rebekah Manley, Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly Bad Dates A Picture Book Parody for Adults
Jenny Browne, Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Poet Laureate Series)
Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters
Heather Harper Ellett, Ain’t Nobody Nobody.
Andrea Vocab Sanderson, She Lives in Music
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho: Barefoot Dogs
Wendy Barker: Gloss
Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way
Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water
Kendra Allen: When You Learn the Alphabet
Emmy Pérez: With The River on Our Face
Kathleen Kent: The Dime & The Burn
David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well