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For our October Third Thursday, we’ll be back in-person at BookPeople. If you’re in the Austin area, we hope you’ll join us for this special event. If you’re not in the area, don’t worry! We’ll be live streaming on our YouTube Channel.
“The revision for me is the exciting part; it’s the part that I can’t wait for—getting the whole dumb thing done so that I can do the real work, which is making it better and better and better.” – Toni Morrison
Oh, the joy and the agony of revision! There’s a reason they call it “killing your darlings,” that’s for sure. For some writers, revision feels like a high crime, for others, it’s when the good stuff happens (see Toni Morrison’s quote above). Join us for this panel conversation with three accomplished authors – Aaron H. Aceves, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Jessica Goudeau – as we discuss the different ways they approach revision.
We’ll touch on when to start revising, how to know you’re done, and all of the steps between. If you’re just getting started, this conversation will help you consider what type of writer you are when it comes to revision. If you’re in the middle of revising, you’re going to come away with some tips for getting unstuck. And if you’ve already established your revision habits, this is your chance to maybe shake things up in service to yourself and the work. Regardless, it’s a topic that guarantees a lively discussion. Grab that red pencil and join us on October 19!
No need to RSVP for this in-person event (you can just show up), but if you’d like us to send you a reminder in the days leading up, register above and we’ll be sure to!
Aaron H. Aceves (he/him) is a bisexual, Mexican-American writer born and raised in East L.A. He graduated from Harvard College and received his MFA from Columbia University. His fiction has appeared in Epiphany, The Florida Review, and Passages North, among other places. He currently lives in Texas, where he serves as an Early Career Provost Fellow at UT Austin, and his debut young adult novel, This Is Why They Hate Us, was released by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. It received multiple starred reviews and was named a Best Young Adult Book of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the nationally bestselling author of the novel Woman of Light and the widely acclaimed short story collection Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of an American Book Award. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Fajardo-Anstine is the 2022–2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. She is from Denver, Colorado.
Jessica Goudeau is the author of After the Last Border: Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and a Christopher Award. It was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, World Magazine’s “Understanding the World” Book of the Year, a Library Journal “Best Social Science Book of the Year” and one of Chicago Public Library’s “Best Books of 2020”; it was a finalist for the Writer’s League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award, a finalist for the BookTube Prize, shortlisted for the Chautauqua Prize, and longlisted for the Reading the West Narrative Nonfiction Award. Her next nonfiction book, We Were Illegal, will also be with Viking. She has been a columnist for Catapult and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Teen Vogue, among many other places. She produced projects for Teen Vogue (“Ask a Syrian Girl”) and “A Line Birds Cannot See,” a documentary about a young girl who crossed the border into the US on her own that was distributed by The New Yorker. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Texas, served as a Mellon Writing Fellow and Interim Writing Center Director at Southwestern University, was a Visiting Professor at Sewanee School of Letters, and teaches Creative Nonfiction at Wilkes University. Goudeau has spent more than a decade working with refugees in Austin, Texas and was the co-founder of Hill Tribers, a nonprofit that provided supplemental income for Burmese refugee artisans for seven years until it successfully ended when the last artisan found full-time employment.
