ShelfLife@Texas

Foodies, scholars and bibliophiles will come together at a special BookPeople event featuring a reading and signing by Elizabeth Engelhardt, associate professor of American Studies and author of “A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food” (University of Georgia Press, 2011) at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 20.

Special guests will include Carol Ann Sayle, of Boggy Creek Farm, and Stephanie McClenny, of Confituras. Enjoy special tastings inspired by the book along with Saint Arnold Brewing Company beverages.

About the book: Combining the study of food…

The accent is still there, made faint by long years away from Australia.

Dominic Smith, a 2003 alumnus of the Michener Center’s MFA program in writing, was born in Brisbane and grew up in Sydney, but his education and work have taken him far from the continent since—he earned his B.A. in Iowa and worked in the dotcom boom in Europe before coming to The University of Texas at Austin for graduate school.  Smith seems to have found Texas to his liking,…

Alex Shakar

“It’s exciting to meet an author who’s unafraid of heights.”

So writes one New York Times reviewer of Alex Shakar, a 1994 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Department of English graduate program in creative writing and former Michener Fellow.  Shakar, whose newest book “Luminarium” was released from Soho Press last month to critical praise, will be in Austin this week to read and sign at Austin’s BookPeople.  Friends and fans will get a chance to hear new work from…

Alberto Martinez. Photo by Judy Hogan, administrative assistant in the Department of History.

Legend has it Benjamin Franklin ventured out on a stormy day to fly a kite with a lightning rod and a key dangling on the end of the string. When the lightning struck the kite, the powerful bolt charged the metal key. Franklin then touched the key and got zapped, thus proving the electrical nature of lightning.

It is a captivating story. Yet just as Pecos Bill never…

Joseph Skibell, a native of the Texas Panhandle, was an accomplished playwright and screenwriter living in Los Angeles when he joined the first-admitted class of UT’s Michener Center for Writers in 1993.  Switching his emphasis to fiction after a year in the program, he graduated in 1996 with a novella submitted as his thesis, which grew into his debut novel, “A Blessing on the Moon,” published by Algonquin in 1997.  Skibell joined the English Department/Creative Writing faculty at Emory University in 1999, where he…

Belinda Acosta, alumna of The University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers and longtime columnist for the Austin Chronicle, debuts as a published novelist this month with the release of “Damas, Dramas and Ana Ruiz,” the first of two books she has written for Grand Central Publishing’s “A Quinceañera Club,” a new series which will explore Mexican American life and culture.

What is a quinceañera?  In the Hispanic culture, it’s a girl’s 15th birthday party, a coming-of-age celebration much like a sweet sixteen, but with…

Lucas A. (Scot) Powe Jr., a professor of law and government at The University of Texas at Austin, will be at BookPeople this Monday, May 4, at 7:30 p.m. to discuss and sign his lastest book, “The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008″ (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Powe, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1970-71, is a leading historian of the Supreme Court and a First Amendment scholar.

In his new book released this month, Powe provides a…

Three Michener Center alumni—whose ties date back to birth and their undergraduate days— have debut poetry collections out and will read from their work at BookPeople at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 25. The poets are: Matthew and Michael Dickman, and Michael McGriff.

Twin poets Matthew and Michael Dickman beat long odds to both earn admission to the Michener Center’s graduate program in 2002, and they have gone on to curiously parallel successes.

Both landed first book deals at Copper Canyon Press. Matthew’s “All…

University of Texas law professor Tom McGarity will be at BookPeople this Saturday, Feb. 7, at 3 p.m. to discuss and sign his latest book, “The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries” (Yale University Press, 2008).

McGarity, a regulatory law expert, says most consumers would be surprised to learn that the doors to the local courthouses are in jeopardy of being closed to them if they have been injured by a defective product, sickened by contaminated food, or disabled…

Texas Monthly’s new editor Jake Silverstein, a 2006 graduate of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, will read at BookPeople at 7 p.m., Jan. 20 from “Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine” (New Press, 2008).

The collection features 15 pieces of inside-out reportage by Silverstein and other cutting-edge journalists such as Barbara Ehrenreich, William T. Vollmann, Charles Bowden, Jay Kirk and Wells Trevor.  

“A piece I wrote on high-stakes poetry gambling is in the book,” Silverstein says.…