Texas Book Festival is honored to announce David Bowles as the recipient of the 2026 Texas Writer Award. Each year, we award an author whose work has profoundly contributed to the state’s literary canon. Their name is added to a growing list of authors whose work has made a lasting impact on the Texas literary landscape. Nominees are evaluated on originality, literary achievement, and the impact of their body of work.
Bowles will be honored with a pair of custom-made boots, crafted by the El Paso-based artisans at Rocketbuster, during a special ceremony at the 2026 Texas Book Festival (Nov. 14–15) in downtown Austin. Festival attendees can also see Bowles during a separate Festival session for his new book, The Hero Twins in the Realm of Fright.
TBF Literary Director Hannah Gabel and Director of Youth Programs Michelle Hernandez interviewed Bowles about his work, relationship to Texas and the Festival, and what it means to be the 2026 Texas Writer Award recipient.
HG: Can you share a bit about your connection to Texas and how your Texas ties have shaped your voice and perspective as a writer?
I was born and raised in deep South Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, and except for a handful of years when my father was stationed in South Carolina as part of his service in the US Navy, this place has always been the center of my life. I grew up in a Mexican American family shaped by both sides of the border, with relatives, stories, foodways, language, and memory flowing back and forth across the Río Grande. That transnational experience formed my sense of the world long before I had the vocabulary to describe it.
Texas isn’t just lines on a map or the carefully curated history promulgated by those in power. I feel Texas in blood and bones. My soul is rooted in its soil. Texas is the smell of pinkladies and mesquite, the heat rising off caliche roads, the cadence of Tex-Mex, the complicated love of my mestizo family, the ache of history, the daily miracle of communities that keep caring for one another despite being misunderstood from the outside. Growing up here taught me to mistrust easy binaries: U.S./Mexico, English/Spanish, past/present, Indigenous/European, local/universal. The border showed me that identity is braided, layered, and constantly reshaping itself while preserving essential continuity.
That has shaped my voice enormously. My work often tries to capture the music of people who live between worlds and yet are fully rooted in their own. I write out of a South Texas sensibility: humorous, haunted, politically aware, family-centered, and deeply invested in place. I want my books to push back against the flattening of Texas (especially my beloved border) into stereotypes. The Valley is more than some crisis or backdrop for political theater. It is home. It is history. It is a source of beauty, struggle, imagination, and joy.
MH: Your unique body of work includes children’s books, adult books, graphic novels, poetry as well as translations. Can you tell us a little bit about how you approach writing different forms for different audiences?
I tend to think of form as a kind of vessel. The story tells me what shape it needs. Sometimes it needs the compression and musicality of poetry, as with They Call Me Güero and They Call Her Fregona. Sometimes it needs the visual energy of comics or graphic novels, where image and text work together in a kind of duet. Sometimes it needs the intimacy of a picture book, where every word has to carry enormous weight because the art is also telling the story so the text must be transcendent and perfect. And sometimes it needs the breadth of prose, essay, or translation.
The audience matters, of course, but I never think of writing for young people as writing “down.” Children and teens are among the most sophisticated readers we have. They may not have adult experience, but they understand wonder, fear, injustice, longing, humor, shame, and love with tremendous clarity. So when I write for them, I try to be accessible without being simplistic. I want to give them language that respects their intelligence and their emotional lives. The latter is one of the most rewarding aspects of writing kid lit. Young people feel everything with an intensity most adults train themselves out of. I don’t ever want to lose that untrammeled passion, what the Aztecs called “ellelli”—raw, uncensored emotion that rises from the essential core of a person, their true ethics and empathy.
Translation is another kind of listening. It requires humility, because you are serving another text, another voice, another cultural moment. But it also involves creativity, especially when moving between English, Spanish, Nahuatl, or the many forms of border speech that matter to my work. Across all forms, I am usually asking the same questions: Whose story has been pushed to the margins? How did or do people from that community likely experience the original text? What literary resources does this story require for modern readers of the target language to experience something akin to its intended impact? And how can I make the reader feel that the world is larger, stranger, and more connected than they imagined?
HG: As both a professor and an author, you spend a great deal of time engaging with young readers and writers. How have your students impacted your perspective or creative trajectory over the years?
My students changed everything. Before I was a university professor, I taught middle school, and it was a group of struggling readers who helped me understand my calling. I was trying to teach literary concepts, and the texts we were using simply were not reaching them. So I began drawing on the scary folktales and border legends that had captivated me as a child, turning them into stories my students could analyze. Suddenly they were engaged. They saw themselves, their families, their fears, and their humor reflected on the page. That experience made me realize that writing for young people was not a detour from serious literary work. It was the work.
That epiphany is confirmed for me every time I present at a school to groups of young people who are reading my work. The more I see children excited, shocked, or even moved to tears by the realization that they are seen, that they matter, that they are worthy of being depicted in the pages of books … the more I thank whatever wheels of fate placed me on this path. It is humbling and awe-inspiring.
At UTRGV, my students continue to shape me. Many of them are first-generation college students. Many are bilingual or come from families whose stories have not been given enough space in classrooms or publishing. Their hunger for representation, their sharpness as readers, and their insistence on complexity remind me why this work matters. They keep me honest. They also keep me hopeful.
Teaching has made me a more generous writer and editor. It has taught me that talent is everywhere, but access is not. When I stand in front of a classroom or visit a school, I am not just thinking about the books I have written. I am thinking about the books those students might write if they are given permission, tools, and encouragement. My students have pushed me to create work that opens doors, not just for readers but for future storytellers. And I will stand at that gate, my foot jammed in to stop it from closing, until I am dragged forcibly away.
MH: Some of your readers may not know that your professional accomplishments include work as a screenwriter and TV film consultant. Can you tell us more about that side of your career and how it intersects with your work as an author?
That side of my career has grown out of the same interests that drive my books: story, culture, language, and representation. I have worked on television and film projects in different capacities, including consulting on Mesoamerican and Mexican American cultural material, contributing to story development, and helping creators think through language, history, and worldview. Projects such as Victor and Valentino, the Moctezuma and Cortés miniseries from Amazon and Amblin (which sadly became a victim of COVID), and Monsters and Mysteries in America have let me bring my knowledge of folklore, border culture, and Indigenous Mesoamerican traditions into collaborative visual storytelling.
I also have spent a decade trying to bring some of my own projects to the screen (and getting very, very close, so cross your fingers). TV and film work is fascinating because it is so collective. A novel or poem can feel very solitary, but film and television require conversation. You are always thinking about what an image can do, what a line of dialogue must accomplish quickly, how a visual motif carries meaning, how an audience receives cultural information without being lectured. And getting into that room with executives, pitching your project with every ounce of confidence and solidarity with your team you can muster, is itself an ordeal that shapes the way you look at creative work.
The crucible of producer notes, multiple (often page-one) rewrites, and development hell has influenced my prose and comics writing. It has made me more conscious of pacing, scene construction, and the power of visual detail.
At the same time, my work as an author informs my screenwriting and consulting. I am always asking whether a story honors the people and traditions it draws from. I am interested in specificity: not a generic “Latine” culture or a vague “Aztec” aesthetic, but particular communities, languages, histories, and cosmologies. Whether I am writing a book or consulting, I want the work to feel alive, textured, and accountable.
HG: What authors and/or books have made an impact on you and helped shape your work as a writer?
The first storytellers who shaped me were not famous authors but my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. Their cuentos (often spooky, funny, tragic, and morally complicated) gave me my earliest sense of narrative. Those stories blended Mexican folklore, border legend, Catholic imagery, Southern Gothic atmosphere, and family gossip into something that felt utterly natural to me. I think I have been trying to turn that oral inheritance into literature ever since.
My mother taught me to read when I was four, and I quickly outstripped my peers. By the time I was seven, I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia. By nine, The Lord of the Rings. As a young reader, with the guidance of great librarians, I was shaped by fantasy, science fiction, adventure and mythology. A handful of amazing teachers led me toward classical world literature and poetry. On my own, however, I found my way into reading voices from communities on the margins of US literature, especially Black women such as Octava Butler, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.
Later, when I was in college, writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gary Soto, Pat Mora, and Tomás Rivera helped me see that Mexican American life could be the center of literature, not merely its subject, as had been the case in the books I’d encountered in high school. The work of Francisco X. Alarcón drew me toward the recovery and translation of Indigenous Mesoamerican texts, especially Nahua poetry and historical narratives. Encountering that material changed the trajectory of my literary life.
I also owe a great debt to contemporary children’s and YA literature. Writers like Jacqueline Woodson, Lesléa Newman, Meg Medina, Kyle Lukoff, Guadalupe García McCall, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Darcie Little Badger, and many others have expanded my sense of what books for young readers can do. And because I write across genres, I am constantly learning from poets, comics creators, horror writers, translators, scholars, and historians. My work is a crossroads, and so is my TBR pile.
MH: The Rio Grande Valley feels deeply embedded in your work. What is it about that place and community that continues to inspire you creatively?
The Valley is inexhaustible to me. It is one of the most misunderstood regions in the United States, but also one of the most culturally rich. It has its own rhythms, its own humor, its own political contradictions, its own beauty. It is a place of paradoxes: immigration and rootedness, of poverty and abundance, of trauma and tenderness. People from the outside often want to turn it into a symbol of crisis, of danger, of national anxiety. But those of us who live here know it as a network of families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, fields, ranchos, flea markets, taquerías, etc. A web with space for any and all, structured to provide support, glittering with story.
Creatively, I am drawn to the Valley precisely because it refuses simplicity. It is bilingual and bicultural, but also Indigenous, Black, Asian, European, Caribbean, Central American, and more. It is rural and urban, traditional and futuristic, sacred and profane. It is full of ghosts and the communal scars that they symbolize, but also full of kids laughing, musicians playing, abuelas cooking, organizers working, teachers teaching, and families crossing bridges with shopping bags and complicated histories.
I keep returning to the Valley because it still has so much to say. Every genre I work in—realism, fantasy, horror, poetry, picture books, comics—can find a home there. The Valley allows me to write about border walls and monsters, first love and family duty, Indigenous memory and contemporary joy. It reminds me that the local is never small. If you look closely enough at one place, you can see the whole world.
Because, at the end of the day, the RGV is brimming with people, just as lovely and confounded and hopeful as any group of humans that has ever existed.
HG: What impact do you hope your work will have on future generations?
I hope my work helps future generations feel seen, especially Mexican American, Latine, Indigenous, queer, bilingual, and borderlands readers who have too often been told, directly or indirectly, that their stories don’t matter as much. I want those young people to open a book and recognize the texture of their lives: the language, the food, the jokes, the family dynamics, the beauty, the hurt, the resilience. I want them to know that they and their communities are worthy of art.
I also hope my books help repair some of the cultural memory that colonization, racism, and assimilation have damaged. So much of my work reaches back toward Mesoamerican stories, Nahua poetry, Mexican folklore, and border legend because I believe remembering can be a form of healing. I do not mean nostalgia. I mean a living, critical, imaginative relationship with the past—one that helps us understand who we are and what futures we might build by the process I call by its Nahuatl name: mecachihualiztli, literally “rope-making,” the braiding of the past that anchors us more fully into our present and then outward toward our dreamed-of descendants.
Finally, I hope my work gives readers courage. Courage to write. Courage to translate themselves. Courage to love where they come from without pretending it is perfect. Courage to question injustice and to stand up to monsters armed with the survival of our ancestors as a surety that we, too, will survive. Courage to imagine otherwise. If a young person reads one of my books and thinks, “My story matters, too; I will find a way to tell it,” then I have done something worthwhile.
MH: Do you have any particularly special memories from your involvement with the Texas Book Festival over the years, either as an author or as an attendee?
The Texas Book Festival has always felt like one of those rare spaces where the vastness of Texas literature becomes visible. You can be walking from one session to another and suddenly find yourself in conversation with a picture book creator, a poet, a historian, a novelist, a journalist, a teacher, a bookseller, or a young reader carrying a tote bag full of new discoveries. That energy is special.
As a writer, I have to admit that the fellowship of other writers is one of the most amazing parts of the experience. Hanging out in the green room at the Texas Monthly offices, catching up, taking selfies, making new friends. Pretty amazing. And the experience of being on panels and signing together is also quite rewarding. As an example, a couple of years ago I was on a panel with Neal Shusterman, talking about our recent works of magical-realism tinged historical fiction. He was such an amazing conversation partner, and by the end I admired him even more than I had as just a fan of his work. When we were signing together, his line was (with good reason) significantly longer than mine. But Neal constantly engaged me in conversations with his fans and was so generous in pointing them toward my work. He had no reason to do so, but that’s the magic of the Texas Book Festival (and of Neal’s big heart).
Some of my other favorite memories involve seeing young readers and their families at the festival—especially families from communities like mine who are excited to find books that reflect them. I also value the chance to be in conversation with other Texas writers. Our state is so large and so varied that no single literary tradition can contain it. The festival makes room for that multiplicity.
In recent years, I have also appreciated participating not only as an author but as someone deeply involved in Texas letters more broadly. Moderating conversations, supporting fellow writers, and representing organizations like the Texas Institute of Letters have all reminded me that literary community is built through service as much as through publication.
HG: The Texas Writer Award honors your career as a whole. What does receiving this award mean to you?
It is profoundly moving. Part of me is still a border kid living in Section 8 housing, using libraries as a refuge from the darkness in my life but never coming across books about people like my family members, much less imagining that the stories of deep South Texas could be recognized at this level. To receive an award honoring my body of work as a contribution to Texas literature feels like an affirmation not only of my career but of the communities, languages, and histories that shaped me.
I am especially humbled because the Texas Writer Award has honored writers whose work I deeply admire. To be placed in conversation with that lineage is overwhelming. But I also see the award as a responsibility. Texas literature must be big enough to include the Valley, the border, Mexican American families, Indigenous memory, queer lives, children’s literature, comics, translation, genre fiction, and all the forms that storytelling takes. And I’m one of those whom destiny has called to fight to ensure that our state’s tradition never again contracts to the point of exclusion.
So this honor means gratitude, certainly. But it also means recommitment. I want to keep doing the work: writing books that challenge and delight, advocating for a more equitable publishing world, mentoring emerging writers, and insisting that Texas literature is at its strongest when it embraces the full complexity of the people who live here.
MH: What’s next for you as a writer? Can you share a bit about what you’re working on now?
I am fortunate (and maybe a little foolish) to always have several projects in the works and a few on-sub, as we say in the business (though not acquired yet, nudge-nudge to certain editors). My interests have swung toward historical fiction, and I am working on a MG book about 17th-century youths brought to Mexico from Asia (including the famous “China Poblana”) as well as an adult novel of historical fiction about the legendary young Purepecha woman who led the first mounted resistance against the Spanish, Eréndira. I have three more graphic novels coming in the next two years: The Hero Twins in the Realm of Fright, Robots of the Republic (Clockwork Curandera, Volume 2) and Princess Hapunda and the Lake. I continue to write across forms and to translate (in fact, with book banning making it more difficult to publish, translation is becoming my greatest source of output). I remain especially interested in stories that connect Mexican American life to deeper Indigenous histories and to possible futures. That movement between past, present, and future feels central to my imagination.
I am also continuing my work in comics, including projects that foreground culturally specific genre storytelling, like my feminist horror series The Matron, co-authored by Drew Edwards and illustrated by Monica Gallagher, which is set in the Hill Country and is rooted in Czech-Mexican traditions. Comics are an exciting space for me because they allow folklore, horror, humor, action, and visual symbolism to come together in ways that feel immediate and accessible.
Beyond individual projects, I am thinking a great deal about legacy and mentorship. I want to keep creating books, of course, but I also want to help make space for other writers, especially writers from the borderlands, writers of color, queer writers, translators, and young people who are just beginning to understand the power of their own voices. What is next for me, I hope, is more story, more community, and more doors opening for me that I can hold open for those who come after.
David Bowles is a Mexican American writer and translator from South Texas, where he teaches literature and Nahuatl as a professor at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. Among his more than forty award-winning books are They Call Me Güero; My Two Border Towns; Ancient Night; Flower, Song, Dance: Aztec and Maya Poetry; The Prince & the Coyote; and Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico. His work has also been published in multiple anthologies and textbooks, plus venues such as The New York Times, The Emancipator, School Library Journal, Rattle, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature. In 2019, he co-founded the hashtag and activist movement #DignidadLiteraria, which successfully fought for greater Latinx representation in publishing. He is a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters.