Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans, and the American University in Cairo. He began his writing career at The Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1971. In 1980, Wright became a staff writer for Texas Monthly. He also became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In 1992, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he has published a number of prize-winning articles, receiving three National Magazine Awards.

He is the author of eleven nonfiction books. His book about the rise of al-Qaeda, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” (Knopf, 2006), was published to immediate and widespread acclaim. It has been translated into 25 languages and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was made into a series for Hulu in 2018, starring Jeff Daniels, Alec Baldwin, and Tahar Rahim.

Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Society of American Historians, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, WhoDo.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working-class. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, and the Harold Washington Literary Award. Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold over seven million copies, has been translated into over twenty-five languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and universities across the nation. 

Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author, also known as The Bloggess. Her award-winning humor helps her to write about the darker parts of her life, including her honest struggles with mental illness. Her books include Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy, Broken, You Are Here and her forth-coming book HOW TO BE OKAY WHEN NOTHING IS OKAY.

Jenny lives in San Antonio with her husband, child and a variety of animals. She is the proprietress of Nowhere Bookshop, a progressive indie book store in San Antonio.

Elizabeth Crook

Elizabeth Crook is the author of six novels and a recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s prestigious Texas Writer Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters, and, along with Richard Linklater, Sandy Duncan, Dennis Quaid and others, the 2024 Texas Medal of Arts. She has received a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, among others.

Her most recent novel, The Madstone, was praised by the Washington Post as “the perfect adventure to curl up with on some desolate winter night,” and The Which Way Tree was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “a ripping adventure with a show-stopping finale,” and by O, The Oprah Magazine, as “a heart-pounding adventure” with a “tough-as-nails orphan in pursuit of frontier justice” whom “you’ll follow to the ends of the earth.”

The Washington Post has said that “Crook is a master at rustling up competing forces to create cinematic calamities,” and the New York Times has dubbed her “a treasure of Texas letters whose voice recalls the likes of Charles Portis and Mark Twain.”

Joe Nick Patoski

Joe Nick Patoski is the author and co-author of biographies of Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Selena, and the Dallas Cowboys, and wrote the text to coffee table books on the Texas Mountains, the Texas Coast, and Big Bend National Park.

His book Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers & Geeks Who Transformed the Capital of Texas is a cultural history of Austin.

His more recent work, The Ballad of Robert Ealey and his Five Careless Lovers, is an oral history of the seminal blues band Patoski grew up with in Fort Worth in the early 1970s.

A staff writer for Texas Monthly magazine for 18 years and a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Patoski is a Senior Writer for Texas Highways magazine and hosts The Texas Music Hour of Power airing Saturday nights on Marfa Public Radio and Wimberley Valley Radio. He has also written about conservation in the book Generations on the Land; about Texas sports and culture in the book Texas High School Football: More Than The Game, a catalog of the exhibit he curated for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum; and has also contributed essays to the books Homegrown, Conjunto, My Soul Looks Back in Wonder, and The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. He also wrote the history of Antone’s Nightclub in Austin in the liner notes for the Antone’s 50th Anniversary box set issued in August, 2025, and the history of the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University.

He directed the documentary film Sir Doug & The Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove about the musician Doug Sahm in 2015.

He lives just outside of Wimberley and enjoys swimming in the Blanco River.

Dr. Carmen Tafolla

Dr. Carmen Tafolla, named State Poet Laureate of Texas in 2015, is an award-winning poet, short story writer, and children’s author, and has published more than 40 books. Tafolla has performed her one woman show in ten countries, and has received numerous accolades, including the prestigious Americas Award from the Library of Congress, San Antonio’s first Poet Laureate, and multiple national and international book awards.

She has been called “the Zora Neale Hurston of the Chicano Community” for her impactful voice, and the NACCS Association recognized her for work that "gives voice to the peoples and cultures of this land.” A Professor Emeritus of Transformative Children’s Literature at UT San Antonio, she is currently working on a biography of noted 1930s civil rights organizer Emma Tenayuca.

David Bowles

David Bowles is a Mexican American author and translator from South Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. Among his more than forty award-winning books are They Call Me Güero and its companion They Call Her Fregona as well as My Two Border Towns, Ancient Night, Secret of the Moon Conch, and The Prince & the Coyote. His work has also been published in multiple anthologies, plus venues such as The New York Times, School Library Journal, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature. He presently serves as the president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Christopher Bodmann

Christopher Bodmann has always been captivated by the transformative power of storytelling. For him, stories are more than entertainment—they are vehicles to inspire, drive action, and ignite passion. This conviction fuels every page he writes, with the hope that his words might spark imagination and courage in young readers, inspiring something truly extraordinary.

A lifelong lover of stories, Christopher has written five books, most recently the Kid Comet Trilogy, a middle-grade adventure series that blends humor, heart, and high-flying heroics. His work combines fantastical worlds with relatable characters, using elements of magic and wonder to explore real-world challenges that kids face today. By doing so, he aims to build meaningful connections with his readers and encourage them to believe in themselves and their potential.

Christopher is especially passionate about fostering a love of reading among middle-grade boys, weaving in “gateway” topics that speak to their interests while ensuring his stories resonate with all audiences. His ultimate goal is to show young readers that books can be thrilling, fun, and life-changing.

When he’s not writing, Christopher is immersed in the stories of his own life—living in San Antonio, Texas, with his loving wife and their five wonderful children. Surrounded by creativity and chaos in equal measure, he continues to dream big and write with the belief that stories have the power to shape the world.

April Henley

April Henley is an indie author, a proud Baylor Bear, and the founder and owner of Bay Horse Press! She crafted her first story as a child about a blue, winged unicorn named Sapphire, but her passion for writing caught fire in a high school Creative Writing class. She wrote the beginnings of a story (now "Treasures in a Bottle") and would revisit it again and again through college and her 20s. In 2020, she returned to the story one more time and, in 2023, published it.

When she writes, it is by the window with a view of her garden, a cup of tea, and a candle burning - no artificial lights, no distractions - just her and her characters, and the only sound is the strokes of the keyboard. She authors Fiction/Fantasy stories, inspiring children to use their imaginations and encouraging readers of all ages to get lost between the pages. Her outside interests include horseback riding, Renaissance festivals, cosplay, food, and travel.