October Third Thursday: “Writing Captivating True Crime”
October 15 2026 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM CDT
Free
- This event has passed.
This Event is for Members only.
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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.
If the truth is stranger than fiction, true crime is more complex. From the characters at the center of the story, who carry all the contradictions of humanity, to the labyrinth of the criminal justice system, which itself complicates our understanding of both crime and punishment, crafting narrative from true crime requires a unique approach to storytelling.
For our October Third Thursday panel, we’ll be joined by three brilliant true crime authors and journalists—Bryan Burrough, Maurice Chammah, and Beverly Lowry—to discuss the craft elements and ethical considerations writers must navigate in order to tell stories accurately and humanely while also captivating an audience. Join us to learn tips on research, craft, ethics, and more.
This conversation will be moderated by WLT Program Director Sarah Renee Beach. Come out and say hello to your friendly WLT staff, meet other writers, and soak up the awesomeness that is our literary community.
Buy our panelists books and support indie bookstores! You can find our October Third Thursday booklist and you can RSVP for this event directly with BookPeople here.
Listen to Maurice Chammah’s recently released Serial Productions podcast “The Last Twelve Weeks” here.
Featured Presenter(s)
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Bryan Burrough is the author or coauthor of eight books, four of them New York Times bestsellers, including the Wall Street classic Barbarians at the Gate and Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. A longtime correspondent at Vanity Fair and now editor at large at Texas Monthly, he lives in Austin. -
Maurice Chammah is a journalist at The Marshall Project, where he hosted the true crime podcast series, The Last 12 Weeks, produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times. He was on a team that won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and is the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty (Crown, 2021), winner of the Writer's League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award. His forthcoming book is called Arab/Jew: A Memoir of a Family Between Worlds (Schocken, 2027). -
Beverly Lowry was born in Memphis and grew up in Greenville, Mississippi. The author of six novels and four previous works of nonfiction, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Mississippi Review, Granta, and many other publications. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Austin, Texas.
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