An Evening with Morgan Parker and Lynne Thompson, 6:30 PM

Torch Literary Arts  and the George Washington Carver Mueum presents Morgan Parker, author of You Get What You Pay For, and Lynne Thompson, author of Blue on a Blue Palett, for a public reading ahead of the Texas Book Festival.

Torch Literary Arts is a proud community partner of TBF.

Reading & Reception

Friday, Nov. 15th

Doors Open at 6:30 p.m.

George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center

1165 Angelina St, Austin, TX 78702

Refreshments by Mashae's Catering will be provided.

Books are available for purchase in advance from BookPeople (TBF official bookseller) and everywhere books are sold.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker’s debut book of nonfiction, You Get What You Pay For, was published in March 2024.

Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield; and,, Blue on a Blue Palette, published by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series (Kenya) and the Vermont Studio Center. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review,, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast, as well as the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, among others.

Thank you to our partners and funders: The George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, City of Austin Cultural Arts Division, Burdine Johnson Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Torch has featured work by Colleen J. McElroy, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.