James Frank Dobie was an American folklorist, writer, and newspaper columnist best known for his many books depicting the richness and traditions of life in rural Texas during the days of the open range. He was known in his lifetime for his outspoken liberal views against Texas state politics, and he carried out a long, personal war against what he saw as braggart Texans, religious prejudice, restraints on individual liberty, and the mechanized world's assault on the human spirit. He was instrumental in saving the Texas Longhorn breed of cattle from extinction.
Sabina Murray is a Filipina-American screenwriter and novelist. She currently is a professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Allen Wier, was an American writer and a professor. He was the Watkins Endowed Visiting Writer at Murray State University from 2016 until 2020; he is Professor Emeritus having taught at the University of Tennessee from 1994 until 2015, and the University of Alabama from 1980 to 1994. and Hollins College from 1975 to 1980 and Carnegie Mellon University from 1974 to 1975. He taught in the University of New Orleans summer writing workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland in Summer of 2013. He was visiting writer at the University of Texas in 1983 and at Florida International University from 1984 1985.
Joseph Skibell is an American novelist and essayist living in Atlanta, Georgia, and Tesuque, New Mexico.
Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.
Shelby Hearon was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. She was a professor in Romance languages & literatures and women's studies at the University of Georgia.
Greg Garrett is a writer, professor, speaker, preacher, and musician based in Austin, Texas.
Dagoberto Gilb, is an American writer who writes extensively about the American Southwest.
Philipp Meyer is an American fiction writer, and is the author of the novels American Rust and The Son, as well as short stories published in The New Yorker and other places. Meyer also created and produced the AMC television show based on his novel. Meyer won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He won the 2014 Lucien Barrière prize in France and the 2015 Prix Littérature-Monde Prize in France. In 2017 he was named a Chevalier (Knight) in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Todd Hearon is an American poet, songwriter, dramatist and fiction writer. He is the author of three collections of poems—Strange Land (2010), No Other Gods (2015) and Crows in Eden (2022)—a number of plays and essays, and a novella, Do Geese See God (2021). His first full-length studio album is Border Radio (2021), featuring 13 original songs in the Americana and folk/folk-rock tradition. A second studio album, Yodelady, featuring 15 original tracks, appeared in 2023. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, has been teaching literature and writing at Phillips Exeter Academy since 2003.
Lowell Mick White is an American fiction writer living in Texas whose work focuses on the changing relationships between physical place and the individual.
The Texas Institute of Letters is a non-profit Honor Society founded by William Harvey Vann in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and to recognize distinctive literary achievement. The TIL’s elected membership consists of the state’s most respected writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, and scholarship. Induction into the TIL is based on literary accomplishments. Application for membership is not accepted. The rules governing the selection of members and officers are contained in the TIL By-Laws. The TIL annually elects new members, gives awards to recognize outstanding literary works, and supports the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program for writers.
Oscar Cásares is an American writer and associate professor of creative writing. He is the author of Brownsville: Stories, Amigoland, and Where We Come From. Cásares teaches at the University of Texas at Austin where he is director of the Creative Writing Program.
A.C. Greene was an American writer – important in Texas literary matters as a memoirist, fiction writer, historian, poet, and influential book critic in Dallas. As a newspaper journalist, he had been a book critic and editor of the Editorial Page for the Dallas Times Herald when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which galvanized his role at the paper to help untangle and lift a demoralized city in search of its soul. Leaving full-time journalism in 1968, Greene went on to become a prolific author of books, notably on Texas lore and history. His notoriety led to stints on radio and TV as a talk-show host. By the 1980s, his commentaries were being published by major media across the country. He had become a sought-after source for Texas history, anecdotes, cultural perspective, facts, humor, books, and politics. When the 1984 Republican National Convention was held in Dallas, Greene granted sixty-three interviews about Texas topics to major media journalists. Greene's 1990 book, Taking Heart – which examines the experiences of the first patient in a new heart transplant center (himself) – made The New York Times Editors Choice list.
Miriam Bird Greenberg is an American poet. She is author of four poetry collections: In the Volcano's Mouth, which won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, the chapbooks All night in the new country and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass ; and the limited-edition letterpress artist book The Other World, which won the 2019 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, designed in collaboration with Keith Graham. She was awarded a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and a 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Granta, Missouri Review, The Baffler, and Poetry.
Sarah Glasscock is an American writer of fiction and education works. She is a fifth-generation Texan living in Austin, Texas. Glasscock completed her M.A. in creative writing at New York University, and has been the recipient of several writing fellowships. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals; Random House published her first novel, Anna L.M.N.O. (1988).
The literature of New England has had an enduring influence on American literature in general, with themes such as religion, race, the individual versus society, social repression, and nature, emblematic of the larger concerns of American letters.
Scott Blackwood is an American novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction writer. He is the author of three books of fiction and two books of narrative nonfiction on the rise of blues and jazz and the story of the Great Migration. His most recent novel, See How Small, won the 2016 PEN USA Award for fiction.
Dominic Smith is an Australian-American novelist.
