An Evening with Austin’s 2026 Texas Institute of Letters Inductees

Celebrating some of Austin’s best authors! Join us in celebrating seven Austin-area writers newly inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. TIL, a literary honor society and bestower of numerous awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award, is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. Conversation will be moderated by TIL President Chris Barton, followed by audience Q&A and book signings. Book sale provided by Reverie Books. This event is free to attend. You can reserve your spot here. Journalist Maurice Chammah, who grew up in Austin, reports on the death penalty, prisons, and courts with The Marshall Project, where he hosted the 2026 Serial Productions podcast “The Last 12 Weeks” and was on a team that won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. His first book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, won numerous awards and his second book, Arab/Jew: A Memoir of a Family Between Worlds, is forthcoming in 2027. Adrianna Cuevas is an author of children’s books whose work draws on fantasy, historical fiction, mystery, and horror. Her debut novel, The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez, received a Pura Belpré Honor, and her books have earned multiple starred reviews and appeared on more than twenty state and international reading lists. Cuevas lives in Austin where she has raised her family and taught Spanish and ESOL. Raised in Borger, Texas, David Wright Faladé has crafted work that includes historical fiction, young adult literature, and journalism. A Dobie Paisano Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, NEH awardee, and Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award recipient, he is a professor and Distinguished Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois. Faladé’s novel Black Cloud Rising appeared on the Best Of lists of numerous national publications. Peniel E. Joseph holds the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at UT Austin. He is the author and editor of eight books on African American history, including The Third Reconstruction and The Sword and the Shield, which inspired the eight-part National Geographic Television series MLK/X. He received the Texas Writer Award from the Texas Book Festival in 2025. An Abilene native, novelist Mary Helen Specht was a Dobie Paisano Fellow before winning the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award for Migratory Animals. Her debut was also praised by TIL members Ben Fountain, Stephen Harrigan, and Debra Monroe. Specht’s second novel, Mudlark, arrived in summer 2026 from Ballantine Books. She directs the creative writing specialization at St. Edward’s University in Austin. Poet, translator, essayist, and journalist Liliana Valenzuela grew up in Mexico City but is a longtime Austin resident and University of Texas alumna. A poet who writes in Spanish and English, Valenzuela has translated works by Sandra Cisneros and others. She is a Macondo Writers Workshop and CantoMundo fellow, and she received the national Alicia Gordon Award for Word Artistry in Translation. Lufkin-born, Hill Country-residing James Wade has won two Spur Awards, a Western Heritage Award, and a Will Rogers Medallion. His most recent novel, Narrow the Road, was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. James is a former Dobie Paisano Fellow and holds an MFA from Texas State. His Texas Highways essay “The Gospel of Change” received the TIL’s Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. Texas Institute of Letters President Chris Barton has lived in Austin well over half his life. He’s the author of 25 books for young readers, both fiction and nonfiction. Barton visits schools by the score and loves speaking to professional gatherings of librarians, educators, and fellow writers. He also testifies against book-banning bills in the Texas Legislature even when there’s something else he’d rather be doing.