The heat is thick and the air is charged in late-summer Texas.
Join us for a hot-hot-hot reading by five Texas poets at Deep Vellum Books on August 13th at 6PM. Hosted by L.A. Johnson and Deep Vellum Poetry Editor Hannah Smith.
Jenny Browne is the author of five collections of poetry, including I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, forthcoming from BOA Editions in Sept 2026. Her poems and essays have appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Poetry Magazine, The Nation and The Slowdown. She has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two Fulbright Fellowships to the Seamus Heaney Centre. Browne served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate, and in 2023 was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. A Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and Honorary Professor at Queen's University-Belfast, she divides her time between Texas and Northern Ireland.
Greg Brownderville is the author of three books of poetry, the editor-in-chief of Southwest Review, and a professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is also the creator of an online narrative series called Fire Bones.
J. Bruce Fuller is the author of How to Drown a Boy(LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared at The Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is Director of TRP: The University Press of SHSU.
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut collection of poetry, Querida (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize selected by Shara McCallum and was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry and Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award. He was selected as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine and his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. He served as the 2025 Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.
Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press 2022), was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry.