SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

The Houston Indie Book Festival is hosted by NANO Fiction and Gulf Coast through a collaboration with The Menil Collection, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses at Menil Park (view map).

The 2012 festival will be on Saturday, April 14 from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.. The event  is completely free and open to the public and remains the only one of its kind in the Houston and Austin areas, featuring a variety of nationally-distributed literary journals and small-press books alongside local booksellers, book and magazine publishers, small presses, literary organizations, and writers.

Past Festivals »

2012 Schedule

  • Book Binding with the Houston Book Arts Guild
  • 11:00 a.m.
  • Children’s Program!
Houston Independent Book Festival is excited to partner with the Houston Book Arts Guild for a free hour-long bookbinding workshop for children ages 7-12! Click here for more information.
    • Poetry Workshops
    • 11:25 a.m., 1:00 p.m., & 3:00 p.m.
    • Children’s Program!
Real-life writers Ryler Dustin, Janine Joseph, and Rebecca Wadlinger will lead a mini-workshop that takes children through the creative process of writing poetry. They’ll share a few poems, lead a conversation about inspiration, and use art as a starting point for students to create their own masterpieces.
  • Laurie Clements Lambeth
  • 11:30 a.m.
Laurie Clements Lambeth grew up in California, from Laguna Beach to Santa Ynez. After receiving a diagnosis of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis at seventeen, she began to write poetry that investigates the individual body’s contour in context with the external world. An avid horsewoman, she rode and trained horses competitively for many years. She holds a BA from Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, and an MFA and PhD from the University of Houston’s creative writing program, where she was awarded a Michener Fellowship and an Inprint Fellowship in Honor of Donald Barthelme. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, Crazyhorse, Mid-American Review, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, where her essay was named Editor’s Choice in their nonfiction competition, in The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Former Reviews Editor for Disability Studies Quarterly, she is currently at work on her next poetry collection, Bright Pane, as well as a memoir.
  • Ana María Rodríguez
  • 12:00 p.m.
  • Children’s Reading!
Ana María Rodríguez writes and speaks about science, nature, health and diseases, history, and other subjects in English and Spanish for children and adults in an interactive way. Ana María has published over 85 articles in children and adult magazines such as Highlights for Children, Yes Mag, KNOW, Current Health, and Scholastic’s SuperScience. As of 2012, she has 20 books published. Ana María is the recipient of the Highlights for Children History Feature of the Year Award 2000, and some of her books have received awards from Science Books & Films and Children Librarians International. On January 2012, the L.A. Times published her fictional children’s story, The Mermaid’s Daughter, which is inspired in Ana María’s adult book The Iron Butterfly.
  • Justin Sirois
  • 12:30 p.m.
Justin Sirois is a writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. His books include MLKNG SCKLS and the novel Falcons on the Floor (Publishing Genius) written with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. He also runs the Understanding Campaign with Haneen and co-directs Narrow House, an small press. Justin received several individual Maryland State Art Council grants a Baker “b” grant in 2010.
  • Face painting
  • 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
  • Children’s Program!
Face painting for all ages. Get your favorite book character painted on your face or arm!
  • Panel Discussion
  • 1:30 p.m.
Indie authors and publishers talk about how to submit manuscripts to small presses and the art of self publishing. Panelists include Authors Ryan Call, Missy Jane, Brian Allen Car, and David LaBounty from The First Line/Blue Cubicle Press.
  • Andrea White
  • 2:00 p.m.
  • Children’s Reading!
Since retiring from the practice of law, Andrea has published four books of historical fiction. Written for middle school students, Surviving Antarctica tells the story of the Robert Scott expedition to the South Pole; Window Boy weaves the extraordinary life of Winston Churchill into a 1950’s setting; and Radiant Girl focuses on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 2006, Surviving Antarctica was selected for the Bluebonnet list, and the Texas State Reading Association awarded Andrea the Golden Spur award for the best book by a Texas author. Her second novel, Window Boy, was translated into Chinese with a forward written by NBA star, Yao Ming. Most recently, she published Windows on the World, the first book in the Upcity Chronicles trilogy, about a young girl who time travels back to the Twin Towers to rescue her great grandmother. Married for twenty-five years, Andrea and her husband, Bill, have three grown kids.
  • Andrew Porter
  • 2:30 p.m.
Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel forthcoming from Knopf in Fall 2012. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize anthology and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a James Michener/ Copernicus Fellowship, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, and the Drake Emerging Writer Award. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.
  • Panel Discussion
  • 3:30 p.m.
Editors from local independent literary journals talk about how to submit work for publication and what happens once your submission reaches an editor’s desk. Panelists include Adam Peterson, edtitor of The Cupboard; Kirby Johnson founding editor of NANO Fiction; Joshua Gottlieb-Miller of Gulf Coast; and Amanda Auchter, Editor of Pebble Lake Review.

Mission & History

The Houston Indie Book Festival is sponsored and organized through a collaboration among NANO Fiction, Gulf Coast, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Now in its fifth official year, the Festival remains the only event of its kind in the Houston and Austin areas, featuring a variety of nationally-distributed literary journals and small-press books alongside local booksellers, book and magazine publishers, small presses, literary organizations, and writers. Magazines and books are for sale throughout the day, though the event is free and open to the public.

Since 2008, the Houston Indie Book Festival has steadily expanded from a small gathering of local booksellers and artists to a full-scale regional event featuring dozens of local exhibitors and attracting hundreds of visitors throughout the day. The event has grown to include a day-long reading series, children’s events, musical acts, and, for the first time ever in 2012, informational panel discussions organized by HIBF exhibitors and local readers, writers, and publishers.

For the past two years, the event has been held on the Menil Lawn to accommodate the growing number of exhibitors and visitors; the 2011 festival received an estimated 2,500 visitors throughout the day.

More information »

Sponsors

The 2012 Houston Indie Book Festival is made possible by Gulf Coast and NANO Fiction. Additional sponsorship is provided by the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses, Houston Arts Alliance, Houston Endowment, Inprint, KUHF 88.7, Menil Collection, Boheme, Spacetaker, Acme Rentals, National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, Texas Commission on the Arts, and University of Houston’s English Department.