Inprint awards more than $200,000 in prizes and fellowships to creative writing students in Houston

March 2, 2016, by

Who will be the James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Somerset Maugham, or J. D. Salinger of this generation? For Inprint, supporting the next generation of great writers is crucial to helping us fulfill our mission of inspiring readers and writers.

Inprint is proud to be awarding $201,500 in direct support during the 2015-2016 academic year to some of the nation’s top emerging creative writers in Houston. The money is awarded as prizes and fellowships to University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP) graduate students and a prize for an undergraduate at Rice University.

This year marks Inprint’s highest single-year amount of support for these creative writing students. Since 1983, Inprint has provided more than $3 million dollars in direct support to more than 500 students. Recipients of these fellowships and prizes are changing the face of contemporary literature and have gone on to publish books, win literary awards, serve as educators, and enrich the cultural life of Houston and other communities nationwide. The collaboration between Inprint and the UH Creative Writing Program—a community-based literary arts nonprofit and a university-based creative writing program—is unique in the country, benefiting both the writers and the Houston community. Continue reading

On the road with Inprint

June 19, 2015, by

BEA logoLike physicians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and fans of anime, those in the literary world have their own conventions—that is, annual conference where those in the field share new ideas. (Here, I do not mean “convention” as in a distinct protocol of behavior, although that argument can, of course, be made….).

AWP is the bad boy of literary conventions, where thousands upon thousands of creative writers descend upon a hip city, ostensibly to attend professional development panels and hawk their books. In reality, carousing, quaffing, cavorting, capering, and kvelling are top priorities on the itinerary.

BEA (BookExpo America) is AWP’s sophisticated, practical cousin. From a creative writer’s perspective, this conference has a 401K and knowledge about fine wines. It’s less about hysterical events in a writer’s life that result in a book, and more about packaging and marketing that book once it’s written—the business and politics of publishing.

As a creative writer entrenched in the former convention, I spoke with Rich Levy, Inprint’s Executive Director, about his recent travels to BEA in New York, to see how the other half (of the book world) lives.

Erika: Why does Inprint visit BEA?

BEA gives us the opportunity to connect personally with publicists at major publishing houses.

Rich: BookExpo America is the publishing industry’s national trade show, which primarily serves independent book sellers, always held in May. Although we are somewhat fish out of water there, BEA gives us the opportunity to connect personally with publicists at major publishing houses. We meet with them (1) to tell them about the Inprint Margarett Root Continue reading

A Houston Independent Bookstore Day Celebration

May 11, 2015, by

IMG_4485On Saturday, May 2, perhaps your Facebook feed was filled with friends posting from their favorite bookstores across the country. It was a day to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day, honoring those special places that pull triple duty as retail stores, community centers, and performance venues.

Of course, there’s no team like the home team, and Brazos Bookstore scheduled a day of events to please every bibliophile. The inaugural celebration packed eight hours of special events, with an agenda including family-friendly story time and crafts, a drunk coloring part for adults in homage to the new book Hemingwasted: A Loving Look at Literary Lushes, a reception for the new Shakespeare-inspired mural on the front window of the store, and more.

Mark Haber, sales floor manager at Brazos, talked to me about the benefits and opportunities of the day’s activities. “Our bookstore is truly a community center,” he enthused. “Today, I’ve seen people who wouldn’t necessarily know each other rub shoulders. It’s just a great opportunity to talk about books and be around books.” Continue reading

“People Have to Breathe Where They Live”: Mary Szybist and Kevin Young Inprint Reading

February 25, 2015, by

RM4_4264Monday night is rainy, cold—a good night for poems.

The weather keeps some people away, but not everyone.  Inprint executive director Rich Levy introduces Mary Szybist and Kevin Young as the readers for the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series in Cullen Theater at Wortham Center.  Szybist has won a National Book Award, Young an American Book Award.  I see some of my current students in the audience: I am happy they have come.  You don’t get a double billing like this every day.  Each poet has a theme it seems:  Mary, ascension, Kevin, grief.  There are difficulties with both, yet also acceptances.  You don’t have to resolve everything in order to understand it better.  Sometimes understanding it better is as good as it gets.

Szybist reads from Incarnadine, which won the National Book Award.  Before you even open the door to her poetry, you think of crimson, the red that is more luminous than cherry red, the red of Botticelli’s angels, the red of the Virgin Mary.  Szybist is preparing you for what is her obsession:  the strangeness of the annunciation, the anticipatory moments not only of the biblical Mary, but of our own every day lives, in which “dutiful” acquiescence has profound consequences.  Her poems circle around the scene of the Annunciation—but do not linger there, taking the notion of expectancy to every realm, both immediate and imaginative.

Before you even open the door to her poetry, you think of crimson, the red that is more luminous than cherry red, the red of Botticelli’s angels, the red of the Virgin Mary.

Continue reading

Chatting With Houston Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda

June 24, 2014, by

croppedGwenIn April 2013 award-winning fiction writer and poet Gwendolyn Zepeda became Houston’s first Poet Laureate. Zepeda was appointed to the two-year position by Mayor Annise Parker and was selected by a committee of local literary experts through a competitive process. (Inprint’s Executive Director Rich Levy was part of the selection committee.)

Gwen is a perfect fit for the role of poet laureate, an honor established to bring the love of poetry to new and diverse communities. Born and raised in Houston, Gwen is a popular blogger and the author of three novels, four children’s books, a short story collection, and a book of poems, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming. In addition to these admirable accomplishments, she works full-time, is a parent, is active in the community, and is an all-around lovely human being.  If you have been out and about in Houston recently, you may have seen Gwen reading, leading a workshop, participating in a Houston Public Library program, or involved in some other poetry related activity. Gwen recently served as an Inprint Poetry Busker for Sunday Streets at Market Square.

Inprint is thrilled that Houston has an official Poet Laureate and last week I had the chance to sit down with Gwen (and her husband Dat Lam) to talk about the role of Poet Laureate and her activities. The two hours passed way too quickly. Gwen’s generosity of spirit, quirky humor, simple honesty, and humble and approachable nature make you feel like you have been friends with her for years. We had a great time and I look forward to seeing Gwen again soon.

The following are snippets from our conversation.

Inprint: You have participated in so many activities as Houston Poet Laureate. Which activities stand out in your mind the most? Which have you been the most proud of? Continue reading

Pronouncing your favorite writer’s name

February 14, 2013, by

Inprint Michael ChabonOne of the reasons I wanted to go to Michael Chabon’s reading was to hear Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy pronounce the writer’s name.

More than a few times over the years I’d been — well, disabused of the pronunciation of a word I had come across reading but never heard aloud.

The first was “expletive.” I was 17, and I was in the habit of passing up chances to cuss by substituting a phrase I must have seen in Reader’s Digest, or something like that: “Expletive deleted.”

But I pronounced the word so it rhymed: “ex-PLEET-ive.” Continue reading

Writing the Spark of Life into the Mud

September 21, 2011, by

One of the most exciting things about art is the unexpected synergies and conversations that emerge when various works are placed next to each other, often at random.  Whether in the gallery or on a stage, suddenly links are established and connections are made visible.

On Monday night at the Wortham Center, the audience witnessed just such an auspicious pairing.  As Francisco Goldman and then Nicole Krauss took to the stage, the intimate details from each of their novels created a shared discussion about love, grief, longing, death and hope.  Rich Levy began the evening by saying that Goldman’s novel (Say Her Name), though it plumbs the depths of loss, actually emerges as a kind of celebration.  Before reading from a surprisingly funny chapter of his novel, Goldman enjoined the audience to giggle whenever they found something humorous; he gave everyone permission to experience a complex range of emotions and not simply a somber melancholy.  The chapter featured robotic rats in subway stations and litter twirling the night air like frozen bats, as he recounted several instances prior to the death of his wife Aura Estrada in which he experienced small moments of loss.  These were often seemingly trivial stories, typical mix-ups like a forgotten phone call provoking worry or misunderstood directions resulting in both of them standing alone on different subway platforms with a few stops between them.  These moments of temporary separation became tiny, absurd rehearsals of the larger absence haunting the narrative.  As Goldman joked, “Death doesn’t let you stop for hot chocolate.”  There was a sense of fun in the prose, but also a very palpable sense of ruin, of writing from the ruins of the day that was supposed to have been–“the ruins of the future,” as Goldman called them.

Both authors mentioned Bruno Schultz’s book The Street of Crocodiles as a text they kept close by during their writing process and a book that Aura Estrada also valued deeply.  Nicole Krauss mentioned it as she began her reading as a way of pulling out a thread that united her work with Goldman’s. Unexpectedly, Krauss’s reading also meditated strongly on the aftermath left behind by death. In the section she read from Great House, she used the first-person voice of a father to think about his relationship with his own son after his wife and the son’s mother had passed.

Themes of death and longing and hope reemerged during the discussion section thoughtfully moderated by University of Houston Honors College professor and novelist, Robert Cremins.  Cremins pointed out that all the characters in the book seem to be in a moment of crisis, brutally struggling within themselves.  These crises motivate the characters of both novelists as they attempt to grapple with intensely fraught situations.  Krauss talked about how, for her, empathy is the only reason to write, the opportunity to crawl inside the psyche of another person.  She also spoke about the inheritances that come down to us and “reverberate through the generations.”  Goldman spoke about his investigations into what Marcel Proust has referred to as “the mysteries of personality” (thanks to Lydia Davis’s recent translations).  At the end, Goldman returned to the Kabbalah and the Jewish mystical tradition as he talked about his mission as a writer as “getting the spark of life into the mud.”

In their writing, it seems that both Krauss and Goldman are working towards a similar mystical goal.