Michener Center Presents: Not the Texas You Know: Unconventional Takes on the Lone Star State

Texas authors Emily Hunt Kivel and Fernando Flores reimagine the Lone Star State in their creative and unforgettable debut novels. In Dwelling, Kivel spins a surreal fairy tale of collapse and renewal, following a young woman’s search for belonging across a landscape riddled with housing crises, eccentric strangers, and unlikely miracles. Flores’s Brother Brontë launches readers into a gonzo near-future border town where literature has become an outlawed act of rebellion. Both stories stretch the boundaries of realism and dystopia, using myth, satire, and dark humor to probe questions of power, community, and what it means to call a place home.