2022/2023 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series presents Abdulrazak Gurnah, Joy Harjo, Yiyun Li, Ada Limón, Maggie O’Farrell, Abraham Verghese, and others

Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, presents the 42nd season of the 2022/2023 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, one of the nation’s leading literary showcases. The 2022/2023 season features 10 readings with an inclusive array of award-winning authors, all with new booksincluding Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mohsin Hamid, Joy Harjo, Yiyun Li, Ada Limón, Leila Mottley, Maggie O’Farrell, Matthew Salesses, Erika L. Sánchez, Abraham Verghese, and Javier Zamora – from August 2022 through May 2023. Each event includes a reading by the featured author(s) and an on-stage interview with a local writer, followed by a book sale and signing. In-person readings will take place on Monday evenings at 7:30 pm CT, with an online rebroadcast of each event available 3 days later. For tickets, the full schedule, and more information, visit inprinthouston.org or call 713.521.2026.

Public enthusiasm to return to the theatre remains high, and 3 different season ticket levels are now available: a premium subscription for $450, which includes signed books by all 11 of the season’s featured authors, reserved section seating, free parking, and other benefits; a premium + partner subscription for $575, which provides a household with two seats, one set of books, and other benefits; and classic subscription for $225, which includes a signed copy of New York Times bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel The Marriage Portrait and other benefits. General admission tickets for individual readings are $5 (unchanged since 1980), except for the Inprint Maggie O’Farrell Reading, which includes a book purchase as part of the ticket price. General admission tickets for in-person readings and online rebroadcasts will go on sale on the Inprint website a few weeks in advance of each event.

“What a thrill to be returning to the theatre for a full season of Inprint Brown Reading Series events, with a brilliant, diverse, international group of authors, whose work is stimulating, engaging, and fused to the zeitgeist of the current moment,” says Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy. “With the online rebroadcast option as well, we are delighted to stay connected with fellow book lovers across the country and around the globe.”2

The authors to be featured in the 2022/2023 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series include:

  • August 1, 2022 – Mohsin Hamid, Booker Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Exit West, with his new novel The Last White Man
  • September 12, 2022 – Erika L. Sánchez, National Book Award finalist, with her new memoir

Crying in the Bathroom

  • September 19, 2022 – Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021 Nobel Prize winner, with his new novel

Afterlives

  • October 3, 2022 – Javier Zamora, renowned poet and activist, with his new memoir Solito
  • October 10, 2022 – Maggie O’Farrell, New York Times bestselling author of Hamnet, with her new novel The Marriage Portrait
  • November 14, 2022 – Joy Harjo, three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, with her new collection

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years

  • January 23, 2023 – Yiyun Li, MacArthur Fellow, with her new novel The Book of Goose, and Matthew Salesses, Inprint Fellow and Prize winner and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, with his new novel The Sense of Wonder
  • March 6, 2023 – Ada Limón, 2022-2023 U.S. Poet Laureate, with her new collection The Hurting Kind
  • April 17, 2023 – Leila Mottley, breakout literary star, with her debut novel Nightcrawling
  • May 8, 2023 – Abraham Verghese, National Humanities Medal recipient and New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone, with his new novel The Covenant of Water The series is presented by Inprint, a Houston-based literary arts nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers. Since 1980, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series has featured close to 400 of the world’s greatest writers from 38 countries, including winners of 12 Nobel Prizes, 70 Pulitzer Prizes, 65 National Book Awards, 54 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and 17 Booker Prizes, as well as 21 U.S. Poet Laureates. The series and Inprint receive generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation, Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts, The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, the Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Boookstore (which offers Inprint patrons a discount on books by the season’s featured authors) and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Special thanks also to Winpark, and the Four Seasons Hotel Houston.

Additional information:

The 42nd season of the 2022/2023 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series will present 10 readings, from August 2022 through May 2023:

  • MOHSIN HAMID, Monday, August 1, 2022, 7:30 pm CT, Alley Theatre

Mohsin Hamid is “one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers” (The New York Times). He is the author of the international bestsellers The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Exit West is being adapted into a film starring Riz Ahmed by 3 Netflix and Michelle and President Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. According to The Guardian, Hamid’s third novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia “shows a writer at the height of his powers, with a hell of a story to tell.” He will read from and talk about his new novel The Last White Man, a story of loss, love, and rediscovery that “reimagines Kakfa’s iconic The Metamorphosis for our racially charged era” (Oprah Daily). “An extraordinary vision of human possibility” (Ayad Akhtar), The Last White Man was named a “Best Book of the Summer” by TIME, Elle, USA Today, and Entertainment Weekly.

o In conversation with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, UH Creative Writing Program faculty member

  • ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ, September 12, 2022, 7:30 pm CT, Ballroom at Bayou Place

Erika L. Sánchez is a National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. According to Juan Felipe Herrera, “This book will change everything…. A perfect book about imperfection.” A poet by training, Sánchez is also the author of the poetry collection Lessons on Expulsion, “a fierce, assertive debut” (The Washington Post) that challenges notions of femininity, race, religion, and sexuality. Sánchez will share her new memoir-in-essays Crying in the Bathroom, “an account of childhood depression, falling in love with comedy, a ‘fraught’ relationship with her grandmother, a bad marketing job in the Sears Tower, and risking the uneasy life of a writer” (Chicago Tribune). For Jason Reynolds, “Erika L. Sánchez has undoubtedly cemented herself as not just one of my favorite writers, but also my best friend…. Why wouldn’t I want to be close to someone so intentional, so funny, so proven, and most importantly, so self-aware they could tell a story about their life in a way that makes me take inventory of my own?”

o In conversation with Jasminne Mendez, Houston author and Tintero Projects co-founder

  • ABDULRAZAK GURNAH, Monday, September 19, 2022, 7:30 pm CT, Brockman Hall for Opera, Rice University

Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” (Nobel selection committee). Gurnah is the author of 10 works of fiction that draw on his experience fleeing Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) as a young refugee. He is a two-time Booker Prize nominee for the novels By the Sea and Paradise, which The New York Times calls “a poignant meditation on the nature of freedom and the loss of innocence, for both a single sensitive boy and an entire continent.” Gurnah will share his new novel Afterlives, “a profound account of empire and everyman that is not to be missed” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). A multi-generational saga of displacement, Afterlives “explores what is gained and what is lost in the name of survival” (TIME).

o In conversation with Kiese Laymon, newly appointed Rice University Creative Writing Program faculty member

  • JAVIER ZAMORA, October 3, 2022, 7:30 pm CT, Ballroom at Bayou Place

Javier Zamora is a renowned poet and activist who migrated alone from El Salvador to the U.S. at the age of nine. His debut poetry collection Unaccompanied explores the devastating impacts of the U.S-funded Salvadoran Civil War on his family – his father fled the country when Javier was one, and his mother when he was four. About the collection, Latino Book Review writes, “Zamora insists that the stories he houses in his blood deserve to be told, and in the telling he has created a truly astonishing debut.” Zamora joins us to read from and talk about his new memoir Solito, the story of his treacherous 3,000-mile journey through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. “An instant classic, not only of the United States of America, but of all the Americas” (Jose Antonio Vargas). Solito chronicles two life-altering months of perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, and sudden violent arrests alongside a group 4 of fellow migrants. According to Sandra Cisneros, this moving tale is “the mythic journey of our era …. I have waited decades for a memoir like Solito.

o In conversation with Daniel Peña, UNT Creative Writing Program faculty member

  • MAGGIE O’FARRELL, Monday, October 10, 2022, 7:30 pm CT, Cullen Performance Hall, University of Houston

Maggie O’Farrell is the New York Times bestselling author of Hamnet – “a family saga bursting with life, touched by magic, and anchored in affection” (The Boston Globe). Now translated into more than 32 languages and optioned for the screen by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, Hamnet was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the U.K. Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her other works include After You’d Gone, The Hand That First Held Mine, This Must Be the Place, and the acclaimed memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. O’Farrell will read from and talk about her new novel The Marriage Portrait, which follows the story of duchess Lucrezia de’Medici as she makes her way in sixteenth-century Florence. Inspired by Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess, O’Farrell’s new novel offers an extraordinary portrait of one resilient young woman’s attempt to shape the future of a dynasty.

o In conversation with Maggie Galehouse, Houston author and former Houston Chronicle Book Editor

  • JOY HARJO, Monday, November 14, 2022, 7:30 pm CT, Brockman Hall for Opera, Rice University

Joy Harjo is the first Native American to hold the position of U.S. Poet Laureate and the second poet to serve three consecutive terms. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975 – 2001. Harjo has also written two memoirs Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, and her many awards include the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, the American Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Harjo will share her new poetry collection Weaving Sundown in Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years, a selection of poems that begins with early discoveries of her own voice and ends with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. According to Sandra Cisneros, Harjo’s new book is “light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times.”

o In conversation with Lupe Mendez, 2022-2023 Texas Poet Laureate

  • YIYUN LI AND MATTHEW SALESSES, January 23, 2023, 7:30 pm CT, Congregation

Emanu El Yiyun Li, a MacArthur Fellow, has been described by Salman Rushdie as “one of our major novelists.” She is the author of eight books, including the novels Must I Go, Where Reasons End, and The Vagrants, the short story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She will read from and talk about her new novel The Book of Goose, a story of fate, art, influence, and intimacy between childhood best friends. According to Sigrid Nunez, “Any new book by Yiyun Li is cause for celebration, but now more than ever do we need the clarity and humaneness of her vision.” Li’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages, and her honors include the Windham Campbell Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Matthew Salesses received an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship and the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing while earning his PhD from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He is the author of five novels, including the PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He has also written a nonfiction book called Craft in the Real World, which explores alternative models of the writing workshop for marginalized writers. About the book, Laila Lalami in The New York Times writes, Craft in the Real World “is a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told, and for whom they are intended.” Salesses will share his new novel The Sense of Wonder, equal parts a love letter to the intricate art form of basketball; a 5 blade-sharp page-turner that delves deep into the rotten heart of America; and an ode to K-drama and the liberating power of love” (Laura van den Berg).

  • ADA LIMÓN, March 6, 2023, 7:30 pm CT, Ballroom at Bayou Place

Ada Limón will serve as the 2022-2023 U.S. Poet Laureate. About her work, Tracy K. Smith in The Guardian writes, “Limón is a poet of ecstatic revelation,” and Richard Blanco adds, “Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.” Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She will read from and talk about her new collection The Hurting Kind, a moving exploration of “the restorative connections between human life and the natural world” (Vanity Fair). According to The New York Times,The Hurting Kind is packed with quiet celebrations of the quotidian…. a handful of genuine masterpieces.”

  • LEILA MOTTLEY, April 17, 2023, 7:30 pm CT, Alley Theatre

Leila Mottley is “a bold new voice in fiction” (Associated Press) and the youngest author ever nominated for the Booker Prize. She will share her debut novel Nightcrawling, “a soul-searching portrait of survival and hope” (Oprah Winfrey) which she published at the age of 19. Named an Oprah’s Book Club Pick and a “Best Book of the Summer” by The Millions, LitHub, Stylist, and Elle, Nightcrawling tells the story of a young Black woman who falls victim to a sexual abuse scandal within the Oakland Police Department. James McBride writes, “Leila Mottley writes with the humility and sparkle of a child, but with the skill and deft touch of a wizened, seasoned storyteller,” and Ron Charles in The Washington Post says of the book, “Nightcrawling really is a powerful, poignant story worth your attention…. My god – that voice. It’s sometimes too painful to keep reading, but always too urgent to stop.” Mottley served as Oakland’s Youth Poet Laureate in 2018, and her poetry has appeared in The New York Times and Oprah Daily.

  • ABRAHAM VERGHESE, May 8, 2023, 7:30 pm CT, Alley Theatre

Abraham Verghese – a physician, professor, and writer for more than four decades – was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for “his range of proficiency…. from his efforts to emphasize empathy in medicine, to his imaginative renderings of the human drama.” His debut memoir My Own Country, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, is the story of his experience caring for patients during the AIDS epidemic in rural Tennessee. Verghese is also the author of the nonfiction work The Tennis Partner and the novel Cutting for Stone, which sold more than 1.5 million copies and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years. He will read from and talk about his first novel in more than a decade The Covenant of Water, which follows a Christian family living on South India’s Malabar Coast that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning