September Third Thursday: “Writing the Future”
September 17 2026 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM CDT
Free
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Update as of 9/16/26: Becky Chambers, who was previously listed as a panelist, is unfortunately feeling under the weather and is no longer able to attend. We will be joined instead by Yoon Ha Lee, and are looking forward to seeing you there!
For our September Third Thursday, join us in a discussion surrounding imagining what’s to come and how, as writers, we explore the futures we hope for and the futures we fear.
Whether considering ten, one-hundred, or one-thousand years from now, writing the future comes with the challenge of imagining how societal norms, principles, and technologies will change over time. In these changes, stories of the future reflect our present, either foretelling how our modern problems can compound or exploring how we can create a better world. Or both!
In this discussion, join authors Yoon Ha Lee (Code & Codex), Tomás Q. Morín (Cat Love), and Mary Helen Specht (Mudlark) to hear about how they tackled writing the future of our world in their novels. We’ll touch on balancing writing what’s ‘realistic’ and ‘unrealistic,’ thematically tying imagined futures to the present, and portraying what aspects of the human experience remain constant throughout time.
This conversation will be moderated by WLT Program Manager Lore Arnold.
Buy our panelists books and support indie bookstores! You can find our September Third Thursday booklist here.
Featured Presenter(s)
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Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American sf/f writer who received a B.A. in math from Cornell University and an M.A. in math education from Stanford University, and is pursuing an MFA in media composition and orchestration at ThinkSpace Education. His young adult mecha novel Moonstorm won the Locus Award for Best YA Novel, is currently a finalist for the Ignyte Award (YA), and was a finalist for the Nebula Award (YA). Yoon’s novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and Clarke awards. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl from Rick Riordan Presents won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature and the Locus Award for best YA novel, and was a New York Times bestseller. Yoon’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as Reactor (formerly Tor.com), Audubon Magazine, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s anthology Take Us to a Better Place. His TTRPG Ninefox Gambit RPG, co-authored with Marie Brennan, was a Nebula finalist in game writing. He has written comic scripts for Marvel (Doom’s Division #1-5 and “Epée Is Truth” in The X-Men: The Wedding Special #1) as well as game writing (Counterplay Games’ Godfall, Failbetter Games’ Winterstrike, Alderac Entertainment Group’s Legend of the Five Rings CCG).
Yoon’s hobbies include game design, art, and destroying the reader. He lives in Louisiana with his family and pets (5-string viola, morin khuur, spinning wheel…catten) and has not yet been eaten by alto clefs. -
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the novel Cat Love, the memoirs Let Me Count the Ways, winner of the 2023 Vulgar Geniuses Award for Nonfiction, and Where Are You From: Letters to My Son, as well as the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country. He is coeditor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and is a translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Mary Helen Specht is the author of the newly released novel Mudlark and the novel Migratory Animals, a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and numerous other publications. A Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her family. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2026.
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