Too Small for the Patriarchy: Getting Girlhood Stories Past the Gatekeepers

AWP 2024 Kansas City Convention Center

Friday February 9, 2024 3:20 Rm 3501 EF

Who has the right to grow up in American literature? On this panel, authors discuss the joys, challenges, and importance of writing and publishing diverse narratives about American girlhoods.
Getting these stories past the gatekeepers, who often misunderstand and reject them for being “too quiet” or “too small,” requires courage and persistence. When our own inner critics tell us such stories don’t truly matter, how do we push beyond our doubt and continue writing on a path to publication?

Perception Deception: Propulsive New Fiction

Jennifer duBois and Anne Burt at the Texas Book Festival

Texas State Capitol - Extension Room E2.012

Sunday November 12, 2o23, 12:45pm

Hidden secrets come starkly to light in this session with literary masterminds Anne Burt and Jennifer duBois. Aligned on their themes of the ways lives are upended in the aftermath of loss but differing in their approaches, these books spotlight women at odds with troubling histories and fractaling revelations that are eager to break free.

Story Department

True stories told in 10 minutes or less on the theme: HALLOWEEN.

October 19, 2023 at 7pm, Saddle Up (1309 Rosewood)

Presented by The Consulate General of Ireland. Hosted by Amanda Johnston and featuring Agatha Andrews, Prudence Arceneaux, Celso Hurtado, Rose Smith, and Julie Two Times

Art, Memory, and Larger-Than-Life Parents

Elizabeth McCracken and Ada Calhoun at the Texas Book Festival

House Chamber, State Capitol

Saturday November 5, 2022 1:00pm

In Also a Poet, bestselling author Ada Calhoun explores the fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet, and in the process faces her own past and her father’s. In the novel The Hero of this Story, National Book Award longlister Elizabeth McCracken mines the relationship between a protagonist and a larger-than-life mother. Together, Calhoun and McCracken navigate the connections and histories between subjects and characters and their creative parents.

A Conversation with Mary Gaitskill

with moderator Rose Smith at the Austin Public Library

Sunday October 31, 2021 4:00pm

Since the debut of her revered short story collection, Bad Behavior—which included the story adapted into the 2002 film Secretary—Mary Gaitskill has lent brutal honesty and formal daring to the literary scene. “She catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called ‘the dirt within,’ as well as any writer we have,” as Dwight Garner of the New York Times has put it. Gaitskill’s new book, The Devil’s Treasure, is no less audacious than her previous work. Linked together by the story of a girl named Ginger who discovers a portal to hell in her own backyard, Gaitskill's latest, richly illustrated work presents excerpts of her previous novels, including 2005’s Veronica and 2015’s The Mare, as well as a memoir—all of it stitched together with authorial commentary.

Sex and Vanity with Kevin Kwan

Texas Book Festival

November 12, 2020 5:30pm Virtual

Kevin Kwan, the author of the international bestsellers Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems, in conversation with Rose Smith about his latest novel, Sex and Vanity.

Circe: A Conversation with Madeline Miller

August 17, 2020 7:00pm Virtual

A members-only chat with the Orange Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Song of Achilles at the Commodore Perry Estate. Rose Smith will interview Miller about her latest novel, the powerful story of the mythological witch Circe, inspired by Homer's Odyssey