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(Zoom Readings Monthly @ 7pm CST; RSVP for Zoom invite)

The Big Texas Author Talk is a *free* lecture series devoted to showcasing Texas authors from across our big state.   Each month we feature one Texas author in conversation with another—from New York Times bestsellers living in Dallas, Houston, and Austin to our rich Texas Latinx border authors living in Laredo and McAllen, not to mention from other deep pockets and corners of our culturally diverse state.  Our lecture series is as entertaining as it is informative—and like Texas itself, we offer a vast array of storytellers who represent the spirit of our extremely distinct 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.

If you’ve visited with us over the last three years, you know who we are and what we do, and we thank you for your ongoing support. We value your presence and love seeing your faces! If you’re new to the Big Texas Author Talk and are just discovering who we are and what we do, we welcome you to join us virtually on the third Wednesday of every month at 7 pm CST.

See some of our past Big Texas Author Talks (formerly The Big Texas Read) at our YouTube Channel.

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Wednesday, July 17th, 2024 via Zoom @ 7PM CST

Up Next: Ramona Reeves, moderated Cassandra Lane

About It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories

Winner of the 2023 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction, Texas Institute of Letters
Happiness and connection prove fickle in this debut collection of eleven linked stories introducing Babbie and Donnie. She is a thrice-divorced former call girl, and he is a sobriety-challenged trucker turned yogi. Along with their community of exes, in-laws, and coworkers, Babbie and Donnie share a longing to reforge their lives, a task easier said than done in Mobile, Alabama, which bears its own share of tainted history. Despite overwhelming challenges and the ever-looming specters of status, race, and class, the characters in It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories strive for versions of the American dream through modern and often unconventional means. Told with humor and honesty, these stories remind us not only about the fallibility of being human and the resistance of some to change but also about finding redemption in unlikely places.

In linked short stories taking place across time, Reeves offers up two characters finding their own form of redemption. . . . Both humorous and deeply emotional, this collection shines for its beautifully written characters.
–Booklist

These surprising, wonderfully funny stories glow with comic energy. The eleven pieces in It Falls Gently All Around serve as chapters in a deeply satisfying portrayal of characters facing the expiration dates on their old beliefs and their newly acquired convictions. Ramona Reeves has fully brought to life a cast of flawed, breaking people with bravery and resilience to spare. The book is a triumph of wise and compassionate storytelling.
–Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor

It Falls Gently All Around when a character believes ‘He could make out ghosts swimming in the darkness, like another life he might have lived. . . .’ It is one of several instances in the book when a story suddenly coalesces, and the reader is both surprised and moved, and this particular example speaks to a clear ambition of the author—to capture the elusive human moments that we all experience but for which we need an artist to genuinely see. This is a splendid book by an important new writer.
–Robert Boswell, author of Mystery Ride, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and Tumbledown


Ramona Reeves won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2022 for her collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories. She was a recent fellow at the San Ysidro Writers Residency and a 2024 judge for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in Post RoadThe Southampton ReviewPembrokeNew SouthBayou MagazineTexas Highways and others. She teaches a course for writers working on their first manuscripts and will be teaching at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference later this year. She and her wife currently call Austin home.

Cassandra Lane is winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and author of We Are Bridges (Feminist Press), which NPR called “a stunning contribution to what must become our collective memory.” Lane received her MFA from Antioch University LA. She formerly worked as a newspaper reporter, high school English and journalism teacher, college admissions advisor, senior writer, and community relations manager for the Dodgers. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times’s “Conception” series, the L.A. Times, the Times-Picayune, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and multiple anthologies. She is the Editor-in-Chief of L.A. Parent magazine.

UPCOMING 2024 AUTHORS AND TITLES

Aug, Sasha West
Sep, Elizabeth McCracken
Oct, Joshua Robbins
Nov, Anel Flores, Cortinas de lluvia/Curtains of Rain
Dec, Carmen Calatayud

UPCOMING 2025 AUTHORS AND TITLES

Jan, TBA
Feb, TBA
March, TBA

PREVIOUS AUTHORS AND TITLES

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 UnferthBarn 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

PARTNER BOOKSTORES
We’re grateful to partner with independent bookstore The Twig Book Shop in San Antonio for The Big Texas Author Talk. Order your book directly and have it delivered to your front door!