Deep Vellum Books presents an evening with Heath Dollar, author of the story collection Old Country Fiddle, in conversation with Richard J. Gonzales.
About the Book
Old Country Fiddle orbits around the lives of an eccentric cast of characters from the Texas Hill Country. A roadside flag salesman profits from a neighborhood culture war. A professional congratulator enters a kolache-eating contest to impress a former kolache queen. A closet agnostic tries to dodge going to church with her mother, and the publisher of a Czech-Tex newspaper, using a walker called "the Silver Stallion," delivers papers to the residents at the nursing home where he lives. These stories, which are told with a Texas drawl, cover a wide range of emotional territory and touch on themes that go far beyond the county line.
About the Presenters
Heath Dollar is the author of Waylon County: Texas Stories and Old Country Fiddle: Stories, which won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction. Dollar has also won the Texas Observer Short Story Contest and the Gary Wilson Short Fiction Award, been named a finalist for the TIL’s Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, and twice been recognized as a semi-finalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Dollar’s work, which has appeared in numerous literary journals, is also included in A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality. He lives in Fort Worth.
Richard J. Gonzales is a full-time, freelance writer, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and now living in Arlington, Texas. He is the author of Raza Rising: Chicanos in North Texas (University of North Texas Press, 2016) and Deer Dancer (Sleeping Panther Press, 2017). He wrote as a contributing Fort Worth Star-Telegram guest op-ed columnist, 2001-2007 dealing with historical, cultural, political and educational Latino issues. He currently writes a monthly column for the same paper about Fort Worth Latino history. He has published short stories in the The Americas Review, a literary journal of the University of Houston (Arte Público Press, 1987, 1988). A non-fiction article, “Our Way Home,” appeared in the Panther City Review, 2017. His work has appeared in a Texas Christian University college reader and newspapers across the country. LatinoAuthor.com selected Raza Rising: Chicanos in North Texas as the number one Latino book for nonfiction in 2016 and listed Deer Dancer as a recommended fiction book to read in 2018. He wrote and directed a play Pauline and Louis, 2021, that was staged at Artes de La Rosa, Fort Worth, Texas. The Texas Book Festival in 2016 invited him to discuss Raza Rising: Chicanos in North Texas on a panel. He earned a B.A. in English and Masters of Science in Social Work. He currently is a licensed master level social worker in Texas. He has spoken at area writing conferences about the writing craft and Mexican American history. He spoke at the 2019 Hispanic Organization Genealogy and Research conference about the conquest of Mexico. He delivered a Zoom presentation hosted by the Dallas Latino Cultural Center a monthly Mexican American History lecture. He is a member of the Writers Block, a Dallas-Fort Worth online writers critique group.