Texas Book Festival has announced fourteen celebrated authors participating in the 29th annual Festival weekend taking place November 16–17 in downtown Austin. This year’s Festival will feature New York Times bestselling authors Rumaan Alam and Malcolm Gladwell, California Book Award for First Fiction winner Rachel Khong, Guggenheim fellow Claire Messud, and many more award-winning and bestselling writers to be officially announced in September.

The full sneak peek author list includes:

Rumaan Alam is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Entitlement. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

 

 

Marie Arana is the prizewinning author of LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority. Among her numerous books are the National Book Award Finalist American Chica, the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights, the biography Bolívar: American Liberator (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and a sweeping history of Latin America Silver, Sword, and Stone, which the American Library Association named the best nonfiction book of 2019. Winner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, Marie has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a Latin America columnist for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.

 

Ernest Cline is the bestselling author of Ready Player One, Ready Player Two, and Armada and co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. This is his debut middle-grade novel. He lives in Austin, Texas.

 

 

 

 

Born in Sumter, South Carolina to a military family, Jay Ellis spent his childhood inventing new personas for every town he landed in. After college, he decided to take his one-man show to Hollywood, where he got his start in a recurring role on BET’s The Game. Now an actor, philanthropist, and entrepreneur, Ellis is best known for his role as Lawrence on HBO’s Insecure, for which he won an NAACP Image Award. He appeared alongside Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.

 

 

 

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the cofounder of Pushkin Industries, an audio-content company that produces Revisionist History, among other podcasts and audiobooks. He was born in England, raised in Canada, and lives outside New York with his family and a cat named Biggie Smalls.

 

 

 

Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming. Named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR, Olga Dies Dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and The New York City Book Awards. A Reese’s Book Club Pick, her new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, was published on March 2024 with Flatiron Books. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, she was recognized as a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

 

 

Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. She lives in California.

 

 

 

Attica Locke is a NY Times best-selling author of five novels, including Bluebird, Bluebird, which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She is also a winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and she has been short listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and nominated for an LA Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image award for her work as a novelist. Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include Empire, When They See Us, and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California.

 

 

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

 

Chanel Miller is a writer and artist. Her memoir, Know My Name, was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the California Book Award. It was also a best book of the year in Time, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR, and People, among others. She was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 and a Time Next 100 honoree, and was a Glamour Woman of the Year honoree under her pseudonym Emily Doe. She has always dreamed of writing and illustrating children’s books. You can visit her online at Chanel-Miller.com or follow her on Instagram @Chanel_Miller.

 

 

Liz Moore is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Long Bright River, which was a Good Morning America Book Club pick and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, as well as the acclaimed novels Heft and The Unseen World. A winner of the 2014-2015 Rome Prize in Literature, she lives in Philadelphia.

 

 

 

 

Ibtihaj Muhammad is a fencer and the first Muslim American woman in hijab to compete for the United States in the Olympic Games. She is also the first female Muslim American to medal at the Olympic Games, winning bronze in the women’s saber team event. An activist, speaker, and entrepreneur, Ibtihaj has written a memoir, Proud, and inspired the first hijabi Barbie in her likeness. She invites you to visit her online at ibtihajmuhammad.com.

 

 

 

Michele Norris is one of America’s most trusted voices in journalism, earning several honors over a long career, including Peabody, Emmy, Dupont, and Goldsmith awards. She is a columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, the host of the Audible Original Podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen, and from and from 2002 to 2012 she was a cohost of NPR’s All Things Considered. Norris is also the founding director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody Award–winning narrative archive where people around the world share their reflections on identity—in just six words. Her first book, The Grace of Silence, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Kansas City Star. Before joining NPR, Norris spent almost ten years as a reporter for ABC News covering politics, policy, and the dynamics of social change. Early in her career, she also worked as a staff writer for The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.

 

Nicola Yoon is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Instructions for Dancing; Everything, Everything; and The Sun Is Also a Star, and is a coauthor of Blackout. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Award recipient, a Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe New Talent Award winner and the first Black woman to hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult best-seller list. Two of her novels have been made into major motion pictures. She’s also the copublisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist David Yoon, and their daughter.