DEAR FRIENDS Welcome to the 2019/2020 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series—our 39th season. At Inprint, we are proud of the role this series plays in the Houston community, each year presenting an inclusive roster of powerful, bold, award-winning authors whose work inspires and provokes conversation and reflection. Occupying that niche in the local landscape makes us happy—and ensuring that the series is accessible to all is a vital aspect of what we do. We are delighted to share the literary riches of this season—and the ensuing engagement with this work and these ideas—and are grateful to Houston for embracing it. Thank you, as always, for making all of this possible. See you at the readings. Cheers, RICH LEVY Executive Director Monday, September 16, 2019 COLSON WHITEHEAD CULLEN PERFORMANCE HALL, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON 2019|2020 Tuesday, October 29, 2019 TA-NEHISI COATES CULLEN PERFORMANCE HALL, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON Monday, November 11, 2019 INPRINT ELIZABETH GILBERT STUDE CONCERT HALL, RICE UNIVERSITY Monday, January 27, 2020 MARGARETT CAROLYN FORCHÉ & CARMEN MARIA MACHADO HUBBARD STAGE, ALLEY THEATRE ROOT Monday, March 9, 2020 LOUISE ERDRICH HUBBARD STAGE, ALLEY THEATRE Monday, March 23, 2020 BROWN REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS & NATALIE DIAZ HUBBARD STAGE, ALLEY THEATRE READING Monday, April 27, 2020 EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL All readings take place at 7:30 pm & Doors open at 6:45 pm COLUM McCANN SERIES HUBBARD STAGE, ALLEY THEATRE TICKETS All readings begin at 7:30 pm, doors open at 6:45 pm. Each evening will include a reading by featured author(s) and an on-stage interview. For BOOK SALES & reminders and event updates, join our email list through the Inprint website inprinthouston.org and follow us on SIGNINGS SEASON TICKETS ON SALE! Season tickets cost $225 (a value of more than $400) and will be available while supply lasts. Season tickets provide seating in Brazos Bookstore, the official bookseller for the Inprint Margarett the reserved section for each reading (seats held until 7:25 pm), Root Brown Reading Series, will be on-site selling books at each plus free parking for all seven readings, two free books, and other reading. Receive a 10% discount on the featured title by purchasing benefits. Check the back flap for details. books online or buying a book at the event. Use the coupon code INPRINT to receive the online discount. GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS To learn more, visit the “Inprint Bookstore” on the Tickets for individual readings are sold in advance through the Brazos Bookstore website: Inprint website for $5 (plus a small service fee), with the exception brazosbookstore.com/events/inprint of the reading by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Coates reading tickets Please support independent bookstores. We recommend that books are $30 and include a copy of his new novel, The Water Dancer. by authors appearing in the series be purchased at Brazos Bookstore. General admission ticket holders have open seating, and seats are held until 7:25 pm. Check interior pages to see when online ticket All the readings, with the exception of the readings by Ta-Nehisi sales begin for each reading. Coates and Elizabeth Gilbert, will be followed by a book signing at which audience members can meet the authors. RUSH TICKETS If a reading is not already sold out, general admission tickets will be available for purchase at the door starting at 6:45 pm. If a reading is sold out, all unclaimed seats will be released to the PARKING general public as “rush” tickets starting at 7:25 pm. Students and Refer to the back page for maps and parking locations for the Alley senior citizens (65+) will have access when available to tickets for Theatre, Cullen Performance Hall at University of Houston, and all readings except the Ta-Nehisi Coates reading. Student groups Stude Concert Hall at Rice University. are encouraged to contact the Inprint office at least one month in advance of a reading to request a free block of tickets. Monday SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 WHITEHEAD MADELINE COLSON WHITEHEAD is, according to George Saunders, “a splendidly talented writer, with more range than any other American novelist currently working—he can be funny, lyrical, COLSON satirical, earnest—whatever is needed by the work.” He is the author of seven novels and two works of nonfiction, including his first novel, The Intuitionist, which John Updike in The New Yorker called “ambitious,” “scintillating,” and “strikingly original.” In 2016, Whitehead published the #1 New York WHITEHEAD Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, about a young woman’s will to escape slavery and a literal “underground railroad” with engineers and conductors operating a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the South, for which he earned both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award—only the sixth writer ever to win both for the same 7:30 pm book. Named a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and others, The Underground Railroad is considered an “American CULLEN masterpiece” (NPR). Whitehead returns to Houston with his new book The Nickel Boys, “a stunning novel of impeccable PERFORMANCE HALL language and startling insight” (Publishers Weekly), based on true events from a boys’ reformatory in Jim Crow-era Florida, University of Houston about two African American teens whose polarizing world 4300 University Drive views echo beyond the decades. Whitehead’s many honors include Guggenheim and MacArthur “genius” Fellowships General admission tickets $5 and a Whiting Writers Award. He has taught at many on sale Monday, August 26, 2019 universities, including the UH Creative Writing Program. at inprinthouston.org Tuesday OCTOBER 29, 2019 DEMCZUK TA-NEHISI GABRIELLA TA-NEHISI COATES’s “visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive” language has been hailed by the Toni Morrison as “required reading,” and The New York Observer COATES calls him “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States.” Coates’s groundbreaking book Between the World and Me—an essay in the form of a letter to his son—was a #1 New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Award and an NAACP Image Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, and was on several end-of-year best book lists. The Boston Globe describes it as “written in the tradition of James Baldwin with echoes of Ralph 7:30 pm Ellison’s Invisible Man.” A former national correspondent for The Atlantic, Coates has been praised for his journalism on cultural, political, and social issues. In 2017, CULLEN his essays were published in We Were Eight Years in Power, an “emotionally charged, deftly drafted, and urgently relevant” (Kirkus Reviews) collection examining the PERFORMANCE HALL nation’s cultural and political landscape during the Obama administration. Coates, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, is also author of the memoir The University of Houston Beautiful Struggle and the comic book series Black Panther and Captain America. 4300 University Drive He will read from his highly anticipated debut novel The Water Dancer. “In prose that sings and imagination that soars,” writes Publisher Weekly, “Coates further General admission tickets $30 (includes a cements himself as one of this generation’s most important writers, tackling one copy of The Water Dancer) on sale Tuesday, of America’s oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. This is bold, September 17, 2019 at inprinthouston.org dazzling, and not to be missed.” Please note that Mr. Coates will not be participating in a book signing. Monday NOVEMBER 11, 2019 SANDERS - GREENFIELD TIMOTHY ELIZABETH GILBERT’s “prose is fueled by a mix of intel- ELIZABETH ligence, wit, and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible” (The New York Times Book Review). Her work has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Gilbert is best known for her memoir Eat Pray Love—“a wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight” (Anne GILBERT Lamott)—following a difficult divorce and travels through Italy, India, and Indonesia. Translated into more than 30 languages, the book was an international bestseller, with more than 12 million copies sold worldwide. Her novel The Signature of All 7:30 pm Things, “a masterly tale of overflowing sensual and scientific enthusiasms in the nineteenth century” (Time), was named STUDE a best book of 2013 by The New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and CONCERT HALL The New Yorker. She comes to Houston to read from City of Girls, her new novel set in the golden age of the theatre world Rice University in 1940s New York City that “embraces…the power of a woman breaking from a traditional path” and is “loaded with humor Entrance 18 & Entrance 20 and insight” (Newsday). Gilbert wears many hats—“bestselling off of Rice Boulevard writer, matron saint of divorced women, modern symbol of follow-your-bliss wisdom” (Cosmopolitan)—and according to General admission tickets $5 Jennifer Egan, “if a more likable writer than Gilbert is cur- on sale Tuesday, October 30, 2019 rently in print, I haven’t found him or her.” at inprinthouston.org Please note that Ms. Gilbert will not be participating in a book signing. CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four poetry collections, including Blue Hour, The Angel of History, Gathering the Tribes, which won the Yale Series of Younger Monday Poets Award, and The Country Between Us, in which, according to Joyce Carol Oates, Forché “like Neruda, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov and others… addresses herself to JANUARY 27, 2020 the… world.” She is also editor of the groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, and a noted translator of poets as varied as Claribel Alegría, Georg Trakl, and Mahmoud Darwish.