We’re excited to partner with Interabang Books in Dallas and The Twig Book Shop in San Antonio for The Big Texas Read. You can order your book directly from either bookstore and have it delivered to your front door!

Unplug from the outside world and JOIN us at The Big Texas Read (TBTR) brought to you by Writing Workshops Dallas and Gemini Ink. As featured in Poets&Writers, Forbes, The Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Express-News, U.S. News & World Report, San Francisco Chronicle, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Houston Chronicle, and Texas Highways, we’ll be reading ONE work of prose or poetry written by a Texas author every month! We’ll be with you all the way from page one to “THE END” with our Zoom author chats and Q&A’s, scheduled every two weeks. It’s a big virtual book club, and we’d love for you to join in the fun!

Keep a lookout for giveaways that come with being a book lover and taking part in The Big Texas Read, from free online WWD and Gemini Ink workshops to manuscript consultations. Help us celebrate the diverse literary voices of our state, and we’ll keep you company with great Texas authors and like-minded fellow readers. In these unsettling times, what could be better than a good book, a dynamic discussion, and meeting new friends?

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays, When You Learn the Alphabet (The Iowa Prize in Literary Nonfiction)—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.

These dynamics strive for some semblance of accountability, and the essays within this collection are used as displays of deep unlearning and restoring—balancing trauma and humor, poetics and reality, forgiveness and resentment.

When You Learn the Alphabet allots space for large moments of tenderness and empathy for all black bodies—but especially all black woman bodies—space for the underrepresented humanity and uncared for pain of black girls, and space to have the opportunity to be listened to in order to evolve past it.