Join ASF for the first installment of Story Sessions, a literary series that brings exceptional authors together for a freewheeling discussion about the power of stories and the ways we share them, on September 27, 2024, at Huston-Tillotson University from 6 – 8:00 p.m. We’re thrilled to welcome the nationally award-winning novelist Percival Everett to the stage alongside the distinguished poet and National Book Award finalist Roger Reeves.

This event is free and open to the public and ASL interpretation will be provided. Books will be available for purchase onsite from Alienated Majesty, a bookstore and community space in Austin, Texas, specializing in small press fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics, and works in translation.

Please RSVP here to save your spot!

Special thanks to the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Humanities Texas, and the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation for their support of this project and to our partners at Huston-Tillotson University and the University of Texas John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.

About the Speakers

PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His latest novel, James, was published in March of 2024 to critical acclaim. His other titles include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award),The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.

ROGER REEVES is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2023); Best Barbarian (W. W. Norton, 2022); and King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Reeves is also the recipient of the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, a Whiting Award, and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Princeton University.