Journalist, activist, teacher, poet, critic, filmmaker and playwright Gregg Barrios, who hails from Victoria, Texas, but now calls San Antonio home, is a Texas treasure. Actually, Barrios is more than that: he’s a treasure of American arts and letters, a captivating performer, a consummate educator and artistic provocateur, and a powerful role model for others…
Literary
Previewing San Antonio Book Festival’s Gay Author Panels
The San Antonio Book Festival was launched several years ago in the spirit of the Austin-based Texas Book Festival, a nationally recognized event which attracts hundreds of authors and hundreds of thousands of attendees annually. Sponsored by the San Antonio Public Library Foundation, our book festival, held in the spring on the eve of Fiesta,…
Geeking Out with Erotic Romance Author Mia West
“It would possibly behoove me to be more sophisticated as Mia, but I’m just not. I’m an enormous nerd.” Most days, you’ll find Shannon Morgan trotting on her treadmill, furiously drafting her next book. Morgan (pen name: Mia West) has self-published multiple series since entering the erotic romance genre in 2014, including Tell Me When,…
Words of Wisdom from Celebrated Author Carla Trujillo
Born in New Mexico and based in California, Carla Trujillo is an esteemed fiction writer, editor, educator and a founding member of the Macondo Writers Workshop that Sandra Cisneros established in San Antonio in 1995. Celebrated for her novel What Night Brings (2003) and her work as editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Chicana…
Gay Memoirists Jamie Brickhouse and David Crabb Trip Down Memory Lane
“You know how some serial killers are “returners” — they’ll go back to the scene of the crime to see their handiwork?” David Crabb asks me. “I’m not a serial killer, but I’m a returner.” I’m not a serial killer either, but like Crabb, I’m a memoirist, so by definition, a returner. We are having…
Vet Erika Land pulls poetry from her PTSD
“I had to shut off my emotions. The only emotion was anger.” Erika Land’s memories of her deployment at a military hospital in Iraq include a military pilot’s brain fragments spilling out over her hands. She began obsessively washing them. She’s since recovered from that compulsion, but other symptoms of her PTSD are not as…
A conversation with poet Richard Blanco
“We forget that to be an intelligent, thriving human being means to pull from all sources of information, knowledge, and understanding.” Richard Blanco received our democratic society’s version of literary knighthood in 2013 when President Barack Obama chose him as the nation’s fifth inaugural poet. He is the first Latino, the first openly gay man,…
From closeted to ‘Fearless’ in college sports
“This book shows the images of young people who are role models for the rest of us: athletes who are not afraid to be who they are despite the difficulties in being openly LGBT in sports.” Life is good these days for Matt Dooley, who just completed his first year at the University of Texas…
David Crabb and his Bad Kid at the Twig
I was faced with a choice at a difficult age Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage? But in the back of my head I heard distant feet Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat. – Left to My Own Devices, The Pet Shop Boys If you’ve never heard…
A View of Reality from a Chartreuse Couch*: Susan Yerkes
*My Own Private Alamo Gene: Hello, Susan. I am so delighted to have you visit the world-famous Chartreuse Couch, and we have a lot to talk about: San Antonio past, San Antonio future, Cornyation, UFOs and art. There is just a world of knowledge in your brain and we need to hear all of it.…