Writefest gathers editors, emerging authors in Houston Feb. 22–28

Writefest is a week-long writers’ festival taking place Feb. 22-28, 2016. in Houston. It is hosted by Writespace, Houston’s grassroots nonprofit literary arts center. The festival kicks off with a series of Monday-Friday workshops and culminates in a weekend filled with presentations, critique sessions, panels by local and national literary journal editors of all genres, a Literary Journal Fair, and readings by local and nationally-recognized authors. For details, visit www.writespacehouston.org/blog/category/writefest

(From organization’s press release)

Inaugural People’s Poetry Festival of Corpus Christi Debuts Feb. 26-27

The People’s Poetry Fest of Corpus Christi will be February 26-27, 2016, at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

Scheduled Panels for Friday:

• Border and Immigration
• Women, Gender and Sexuality
• Local Poets Showcase
• There will be an open mic at the Cactus and Vine 2115 Ayers St 9-11 p.m.
• Scheduled Panels for Saturday:
• Nature and Environment
• Poetry in Spanish
• Local Poets Showcase

There will be a Poetry Interactives and Open Mic atCactus and Vine 2115 Ayers St 7-11 p.m.

Almost 30 poets will be reading at the festival including Nathan Brown (Poet Laureate  of Oklahoma 2013-14), Lyman Grant, Ken Hada, Julie Chapell, Juan Manuel Perez, as well as local faculty, recent graduates and undergraduates.

Some of the local poets who will also be presenting and/or hosting panels include:

Robin Carstensen, co-founder and editor of The Switchgrass Review: a journal of women’s health, history, and transformation. She coordinates the creative writing program and teaches at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Javier Villarreal, TAMU-CC, whose work has appeared in various academic journals and literary journals. He is currently preparing his second poetry book and the translation of a book of poems in Spanish to English. He has spent 30 years of teaching in Texas, the last 24 years at the University of Texas A & M Corpus Christi.

Alan Berecka, the reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, whose poetry has appeared in such periodicals as the American Literary Review, The Christian Century and The Texas Review and anthologies such as St Peter’s B-List (Ava Maria Press). Three collections of his poetry have been published the latest of which is With Our Baggage by Lamar University Press, 2013. His second book Remembering the Body won honorable mention in poetry from the Eric Hoffer Awards.

Juan Manuel Pérez is the author of four full poetry collections, plus numerous poetry chapbooks and poetry workshop workbooks. The award-winning poet is also the 2011-2012 Poet Laureate for the San Antonio Poets Association and the Chupacabra Poet Laureate.

Stefan Sencerz is a founder and slam-master of the Ballabajoomba Poetry, in Corpus Christi, TX (the Nationally registered reading in continued existence since October 2000). Born in in Warsaw, Poland, he came to the United States to study philosophy and Zen Buddhism. He teaches philosophy, Western and Eastern, at the Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. He has numerous publications in professional philosophy journals as well as several refereed poems that appeared in various nationally distributed poetry journals.

Tom Murphy, TAMU-CC, whose chapbook Horizon to Horizon was published in 2015 by Strike Syndicate. Recent work has been in Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a Post 9/11 World, 2016 Texas Poetry Calendar, Beatitude: Golden Anniversary Edition, Centrifuge, Nebula, Strike, Red River Review, Switchgrass Review, Voices de la Luna and Windward Review. Murphy has a poem forthcoming in each, the Chupacabra Anthology and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology and will be the featured poet for the May 2016 Red River Review. Plus, he’s co-editor of the Stone Renga Poem that features sixty poets and is forthcoming in 2016.

For more information visit the festival’s Facebook page at

www.facebook.com/PeoplesPoetryFest/timeline

(Information from PFCC materials)

30th Annual Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering Gets Underway Feb. 26–27 in Alpine

Texas Poet Laureate, radio and TV host, recording artist and songwriter Red Steagall and Western singer-songwriter and playwright R.W. Hampton join more than a dozen other headliners and sixty performers in the 30th Annual Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering February 26-27, 2016, at the Sul Ross State University Campus in Alpine.

This two-day event celebrates the oral tradition of the working cowboy in poetry, stories, and music. Headliners for 2016 are:

Friday Night: Ray Fitzgerald, Jeff Gore, Chris Isaacs, Ross Knox, Jean Prescott, Gary Prescott, and Trinity Seely

Saturday Night: Don Cadden, Kristyn Harris, Don Hedgpeth, Randy and Hannah Huston, Joel Nelson, and R.P. Smith

The daytime sessions are free (with the exception of the RW Hampton and Red Steagall sessions which are $10 each). Most daytime sessions are held in classrooms. Three to four performers share these 50-minute sessions, with nine to ten sessions running concurrently.

At 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, two-hour performances are held in Marshall Auditorium, showcasing featured performers. There is a $15 charge for these events. Attendees may also support the gathering by becoming a sponsor or co-sponsor of a performer, or simply by purchasing an event pin for $10.

For more information visit http://www.texascowboypoetry.com

(From organization’s press release and website)

Lone Star Lit celebrates Black History Month 2016

One of the goals of Lone Star Literary Life is to shine a spotlight on the admirable diversity in Texas literature—a commitment that extends beyond demographics, but also to genre and publishing platform and approach.

In this spirit, we’re pleased to highlight Black History Month in February 2016, with a variety of features coming up.

• Behind the Spine Podcast  Our monthly podcast, Behind the Spine, will feature bookman Billy Huckaby of Fort Worth, CEO of Wild Horse Media Group. Huckaby will be discussing with host Ally Bishop the range of Texas African-American titles at Eakin Press, an imprint of WHMG.
• Lone Star Listens Author Sanderia Faye of Dallas will be profiled in Lone Star Listens on February 7. Her novel Mourner’s Bench (University of Arkansas Press, Sept. 2015) is a coming-of-age story of a young African-American girl told across the backdrop of a rapidly changing small town in the South during the 1960s.
• Lone Star Reviews The first Sunday of February and the last Sunday of February will feature Texas African American–interest titles in our reviews.

If you are a publisher, publicist, or author of a recently published Texas African American title, and would like to mentioned in this month’s coverage, please drop us a note at info@lonestarliterary.com.

Black History Month titles from Texas university presses

Marti Corn with introduction by Thad Sitton and foreword by Tracy Xavia Karner

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen’s Town (Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Commerce)

Texas A&M University Press (May 9, 2016)

978-1623493769, Hardcover, 160 pages, $40.00

Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Commerce (Book 22)

In 1871, newly freed slaves established the community of Tamina—then called “Tammany”—north of Houston, near the rich timber lands of Montgomery County. Located in proximity to the just-completed railroad from Conroe to Houston, the community benefited from the burgeoning local lumber industry and available transportation. The residents built homes, churches, a one-room school, and a general store.

Over time, urban growth and change has overtaken Tamina. The sprawling communities of The Woodlands, Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, and Oak Ridge have encroached, introducing both opportunity and complication, as the residents of this rural community enjoy both the benefits and the challenges of urban life. On the one hand, the children of Tamina have the opportunity to attend some of the best public schools in the nation; on the other hand, residents whose education and job skills have not kept pace with modern society are struggling for survival.

Through striking and intimate photography and sensitively gleaned oral histories, Marti Corn has chronicled the lives, dreams, and spirit of the people of Tamina. The result is a multi-faceted portrait of community, kinship, values, and shared history.

Richard F. Selcer, A History of Fort Worth in Black & White: 165 Years of African-American Life  (November 2015

A History of Fort Worth in Black & White fills a long-empty niche on the Fort Worth bookshelf: a scholarly history of the city’s black community that starts at the beginning with Ripley Arnold and the early settlers, and comes down to today with our current battles over education, housing, and representation in city affairs. The book’s sidebars on some noted and some not-so-noted African Americans make it appealing as a school text as well as a book for the general reader.

“Selcer does a great job of exploring little-known history about the military, education, sports and even some social life and organizations.”—Bob Ray Sanders, author of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White

Bruce A. Glasrud and Milton S. Jordan, editors, Free Blacks in Antebellum Texas (September 2015)

Free Blacks in Antebellum Texas collects the essays of Harold R. Schoen and Andrew Forest Muir, early scholars who conducted the most complete studies on the topic, although neither published a book. Schoen published six articles on “The Free Negro in Republic of Texas” and Muir four articles on free blacks in Texas before the Civil War. Free black Texans experienced the dangers and risks of life on the frontier in Texas. Those experiences, and many others, required of them a strength and fortitude that evidenced the spirit and abilities of free blacks in antebellum Texas. Sometimes with support from a few whites, as well as their own efforts, they struggled and survived. The editors include a thoughtful introduction and a wide-ranging bibliography.

“Schoen and Muir were first-rate historians, and their pioneering work stands today as outstanding scholarship. The editors provide a solid overview of the subject, and their bibliography will be useful to anyone interested on free blacks in Texas.”—Randolph B. Campbell, author of Gone to Texas and An Empire for Slavery

Richard Orton, The Upshaws of County Line: An American Family (November 2014), Ottis Locke Best Coffee Table Book Award from the East Texas Historical Association, 2015

Guss, Felix, and Jim Upshaw founded the community of County Line in the 1870s in northwest Nacogdoches County, in deep East Texas.  As with hundreds of other relatively autonomous black communities created at that time, the Upshaws sought a safe place to raise their children and create a livelihood during Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas.

In the late 1980s photographer Richard Orton visited County Line for the first time and became aware of a world he did not know existed as a white man.  He went down the rabbit hole, so to speak, and met some remarkable people there who changed his life.

This book should appeal to anyone interested in American or Texas history, particularly the history of African Americans in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The book should also be of interest to anyone with an appreciation for documentary photography, including students and teachers of photography.

“There are giants in the earth and other ‘presences’ at County Line, and when you look closely at the photos of Orton perhaps you can sense some of them.”—from the foreword by Thad Sitton

Border Regional Library Association honors UTEP filmmaker and author Sandoval; awards to be presented in El Paso Feb. 27

South Sun Rises: A Bilingual Poetic Narrative of the Borderland by Valentin Sandoval (Sherman Asher Pubishing) has been selected to receive a Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association. Congratulations to Jim Mafchir and Valentin Sandoval.

According to IMdb.com, Sandoval studied film at the University of Texas-El Paso, but his filmmaking skill and style is mostly self-taught, honed by hands-on work experience with writer/documentarian Jimmy Santiago Baca, cinematographer Lee Daniel and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Paul Espinosa. From the start, Sandoval has not shied away from harsh subject matter or daunting imagery. At age nineteen, he produced a short film about a young heroin junkie entitled Instrumento, which screened at the Mesilla Valley Film Festival and garnered Sandoval’s first award-the first-ever award for best independent filmmaking bestowed by UTEP. Since then, Sandoval made the documentary Clamor about young inmates in Chino prison, scoring three additional awards, plus short films and The Gray. His work has been screened at the Chicago Film Festival, Santa Fe Film Festival, South by Southwest Film Festival, and Dallas’ Vistas Film Festival.

The awards banquet will be held on February 27, 2016, in El Paso. For more information, visit www.brla.info.

(From organization’s press release )

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