10 Houston Authors We Love
October 2, 2023 | Sean Morrissey Carroll
Whether you know it as Space City, Clutch City, or Screwston, there’s a lot overlooked about the largest city in Texas. From the 215 languages spoken in the metro area to its storied history as a meeting place of cultures, Houston is a vibrant and diverse city well known for food, culture, and big business. From the towering Phillip Johnson skyscrapers of downtown through lush green Oak-lined neighborhoods to strip centers of concrete stretching for miles and sprawling exurbs reaching across the Katy Prairie, Houston has a plethora of real and imagined worlds teeming within. Here are ten of our favorite writers who have called H-Town home, whether Houston-born, Houston-bound, or just passing through.
Bryan Washington
Family Meal, releasing October 10, 2023
With his debut short story collection Lot and a cornucopia of New Yorker articles exploring food and identity, Washington burst onto the national stage in 2019. With a deft touch exploring relationships and spare and concise descriptions that seem to hold more than they should be capable of, Washington’s prose has captured a readership that appreciates his gentle touches with the written word.
Family Meal follows its heartbroken protagonist Cam back to Houston, where he finds cold comfort in sex and drugs after a personal loss. Not only does his hometown provide Cam with a chance to escape, but Houston also gives him a chance to find a new relationship. Cue the Chef’s Table rom-com hijinks and metaphors that permeate all of Washington’s writing as Cam finds poignant moments of emotional depth in the little things in life, often delicious ones.
Sim Kern
The march of history has many moments that hinge on seemingly small differences, and this alt-history changes very little about American elections of the 21st century except for a hundred hanging chads and a few thousand 2016 votes in the Midwest. These butterflies-flapping-their-wings events have created a Houston very different than our own, but immediately recognizable. In The Free People’s Village Kern finds the spirit of Occupy Wall Street idealism and the hubris of McMansion greed at odds with economies based on Carbon Credits and saving the Amazon instead of drilling the Arctic and locking up petty offenders, but the results are eerily similar to our own world’s short-sightedness.
With a bountiful, deep love for Houston-specific references and places familiar to any Rockets-rooting hipster or Harris County cubicle jockey, Kern plies our collective memories for plot twists and character descriptions worthy of any Marvel What If? comic book—trained on familiar H-Town freeways and haunts. In the imaginary 8th Ward the same property-rights and purpose-of-life struggles play out that happen today in the 3rd Ward or Independence Heights, but Kern’s separation from the specific reality of Houston today aids the reader as they suspend their disbelief and find a glimmer of solarpunk not very far from where we are today.
N.E. Davenport
The Blood Trials, 2022
Clutch City’s Red Rising, Davenport’s futuristic tale follows an enterprising young woman hell bent on revenge for the murder of her grandfather. Ikenna joins the Praetorian Guard, a boot camp that kills the majority of its applicants, in order to discover from the inside the identity of the killer. In a world that bends the rules against her at every turn, Ikenna must use her innate abilities and martial training given to her by her grandfather, himself a Praetorian Guard murdered by one of his fellow soldiers, to survive long enough to answer the questions that drive her anger to the boiling point.
A takedown of society no matter its technological level and contemporary racial stigma, The Blood Trials runs full force into smashing stereotypes and lifting up those at the margins of society. A duology with its sequel The Blood Gift, Trials starts with a young protagonist and a YA vibe, but quickly settles in as an adult SFF novel with all the accompanying violence and high drama readers have come to expect in the post-Hunger Games/Game of Thrones era.
Cassandra Rose Clarke
Our Lady of the Ice, 2015
Can you imagine writing a near-future post-steampunk fiction set in Antarctica while sweltering in the Texas summer? Well that’s exactly with Clarke did in her excellent novel Our Lady of the Ice, a whodunit with more twists and turns than a freeway interchange on Houston’s Beltway 8. With a hard-bitten but endearing investigator and personal and political intrigue in a kleptocratic retro-futuristic society, this novel melds genres and can satisfy many readers looking for a new perspective on either mystery or science fiction.
If you can imagine the author, who once helmed the Houston writers’ organization Writespace, wishing for the deep freeze of a frozen continent, seeing the world around them encased in climate-controlled comfort like a giant dome (once proposed over Houston by Buckminster Fuller), watching cultures from across the world mix and meld in a metropolis of criminal intrigue wrapped up in political drama, then you can imagine the genesis of Our Lady of the Ice. The results are a worldbuilding masterclass wrapped around a noir nugget that seethes with a yen to escape.
P. Djeli Clarke
Ring Shout, 2020
Clarke, from Trinidad & Tobago, raised in Houston, and currently residing in a castle in Connecticut, has received well deserved praise for his magical, literary, steampunk imaginings of an alternate world built on social justice emerging before the vacuum tube and eldritch horrors behind racist colonial power structures. Though lauded for his alternate histories of New Orleans with The Black God’s Drums and Egypt in both The Haunting of Tram 015 and A Master of Djinn, this novella of 1920s Georgia holds a special place to me as the first of his work that I read and the most hauntingly real.
Does American racism come from a dark realm of cosmic horror? Is the fight against power structures that hold people of color in the United States from social advancement a battle against monsters that wear human skins? Considering the last decade of American politics I cannot in good faith say it is not. With tight, emotive description and fast-paced action, Ring Shout is an incredible story that builds to an earth-shattering conclusion.
Reyes Ramirez
El Rey of Gold Teeth, releasing October 3, 2023
Ramirez is a fixture on the scene in Houston’s poetry circles who brings gravitas and heart-wrenching interiority to his craft and his community. With his debut poetry collection El Rey of Gold Teeth, Reyes adds to his interdisciplinary craft that also includes performance and web art, short stories, and community action. Confessional, character-driven, and packed with emotional metaphor, these poems are glimpses into a mind in action, interacting with the chaos and confusion of Houston as a vibrant and frustrating place that also includes moments of pure joy and self-reflection.
Lupe Mendez
Why I Am Like Tequila, 2019
2023 Texas Poet Laureate Lupe Mendez has recently had his poetry collection Why I Am Like Tequila banned by a Texas school district; this has a special irony to it since Mendez was one of the core members of the Librotraficante movement in 2012, which fought the banning of Hispanic Studies courses in Arizona. The poet and others gathered books across Texas and ‘smuggled’ them to Tucson to deliver to students who suddenly found their own cultural heritage outlawed.
In the crucible of spoken word poetry Mendez honed his craft, spending over a decade jumping from one Open Mic night to another across Houston’s sprawl and building relationships with poets who have gone on to start organizations like Write About Now and Defunkt Magazine. In that time he developed a style and cadence that makes his words leap off the page, equally at home in the readers’ mouth or the shotglass of the printed page. With emotional resonance and personal historicity Mendez distills the experience of growing up in Galveston to sharp flashpoints and burning desire for a better world.
Anthony Sutton
Beginning each of his poetry readings with a mention that he resides on former Karankawa lands here in Houston, Sutton always sets his audience up for somber memories and fading loss. His collection Particles of a Stranger Light is no different, as Sutton reaches for the small, personal stories that carry him from one fragile moment to another. Inhabiting his place and time in the world fully, Sutton’s writing inhabits all his bodily senses as it negotiates the life it has been gifted; tragic, forlorn, hopeful, and above all—earnest. Both as a student at University of Houston and as a writing workshop teacher at Grackle & Grackle Enterprises, Sutton is a sponge for human experience and a conduit for its expression.
Donald Barthelme
The grande dame of Houston’s literary scene, Barthelme was not only a founding curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the original head of the University of Houston’s Creative Writing department but also a scathing and vexing progenitor of post-modern prose. Though more known for his scandalous retelling of Snow White or his popular short story collections Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, his one foray into children’s books may be a more palatable introduction to Barthelme’s particular brand of prose.
Known for playing with the idea of ‘words’ and ‘meaning’ more than writing comprehensible stories, Barthelme’s contribution to the genre is his reliance on poetic inspiration and experimentation with Dada and Surrealism. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine’s cut-up Victorian illustrations and silly, fractured text are a precursor to internet-themed prose of the 21st century, from their meme-ness to the plethora of in-jokes that the reader may feel like they ‘kind of understand’ like only a soaking in ever-present media society can provide. With witty banter and buried cultural critique, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine may be a postmodern parent’s favorite book to read to a toddler (who will understand it about as much as one can hope to).
Saadia Faruqi
Saving Sunshine, 2023
Author of the ever-expanding and beloved young-readers Yasmin series, Saving Sunshine is Faruqi’s first foray into graphic novels and the result is both adorable and endearing. Tween twins Zara and Zeeshan are subjected to their worst nightmare—close quarters on a road trip to Florida. Though they may bicker and fight the siblings come together when they realize they can help an ailing turtle and put their energy to positive uses.
A tireless advocate for children’s literacy, cultural inclusion in education and society, and interfaith conversation, Faruqi has created a world that surrounds each of her children’s books, getting them into the hands of readers and putting herself into communities to push for both her stories and herself as an author. Inspired to advocacy in the wake of 9/11, Faruqi’s literary journey started after experiencing discrimination as a Muslim-American in Houston, which led her to focus on creating positive role models in her fiction work from picture books to middle grade. With boundless patience for chipping away at intolerance and infinite energy to not only write but follow up her book releases with events, articles and lectures, Faruqi has a backlist of over twenty books and shows no signs of slowing down.