One Page Salon

Featured Presenter(s)

Scott Semegran is an award-winning writer of nine books. BlueInk Review described him best as “a gifted writer, with a wry sense of humor.” His latest novel, The Codger and the Sparrow (TCU Press, 2024), is a comical yet moving story about a 65-year old widower’s unlikely friendship with a 16-year old troublemaker. His previous novel, The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island, is about four middle school friends who sneak away to an abandoned lake house to evade the wrath of high school bullies, only to become stranded on the lake’s desolate island. It was the First Place Winner for Middle-Grade/Young Adult fiction in the 2021 Writer’s Digest Book Awards. His novel, To Squeeze a Prairie Dog, was the winner of three book awards including the 2020 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Medal for Humor. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, four kids, two cats, and a dog. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English. Scott Semegran is co-host of the web series Austin Liti Limits along with fellow award-winning writer Larry Brill.

Mary Helen Specht's first novel, Migratory Animals, was published by Harper Perennial in 2015. An editors' choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Austin American-Statesmen, an IndieNext Pick, and an Apple iBook selection, Migratory Animals also won the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers' League of Texas work of Best Fiction. Born and raised in Abilene, Texas, Specht has a B.A. in English from Rice University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, where she won the department’s fiction award. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including: The New York Times; The Colorado Review; Prairie Schooner; Michigan Quarterly Review; The Southwest Review; Florida Review; Southwestern American Literature; World Literature Today; Blue Mesa; Hunger Mountain; Bookslut; The Texas Observer; and Night Train, where she won the Richard Yates Short Story Award. A past Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin. Texas Monthly has named her one of "Ten Writers to Watch."

S. Kirk Walsh is a novelist, a book reviewer, and a teacher based in Austin, Texas. In the spring of 2021, she published her debut novel titled The Elephant of Belfast, which became a national bestseller and has been translated in several foreign editions. Walsh is at work on a second novel about Detroit during World War II. Her essays, literary criticism, and short fiction have been published in The New York Times Book Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, and others. Over the years, she has been a resident at the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, and others. Walsh is the founder of Austin Bat Cave.

Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese American writer and author of Four Treasures of the Sky. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apogee, Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Rumpus, HuffPost, The Cut, Catapult, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has received support from Kundiman, Tin House, and VONA/Voices. She was born in Changchun, China, and grew up in Austin, Texas, where she currently lives.

Raina Rose is a poet with a graceful presence, thoughtful lyrics, and a unique voice that captures your heart and doesn’t let go. As the second daughter of a country music historian and a Jewish poet, Americana musician and songwriter Raina Rose revels in sharing with you her beautifully twisted, yet refreshingly optimistic perspective on the world. Her unique voice and exceptional guitar playing transcend age, gender, generation, and even catch the ears of those who aren’t typically into acoustic guitar-driven songwriting. With a naturalist’s eye, an artist’s pen, and a lion’s attack, Raina lays everything she has on the line; she makes you feel as if she’s your best friend whispering a honeysuckle-sweet secret in your ear, warmly inviting you into a joyfully intimate and darkly candid conversation. It’s that ability to forge her own path in the world of music that sets Raina apart from her contemporaries, and her “no holds barred, lay it on the line” brand of Americana that secures Raina’s place in music history as more than a mere footnote or a passing trend.Raina has toured relentlessly for the better part of the last ten years, supporting such acts as Jill Sobule, The Bacon Brothers, Loudon Wainwright III and Tracy Grammer, and sharing the stage with contemporaries such as John Elliott, Rebecca Loebe, Jonathan Byrd, AJ Roach, and Anthony da Costa. Now married to bass player, Andrew Pressman (Jimmie LaFave, Sam Baker, Ben Kweller, Carrie Elkin) and a mother of two young boys, Her travels have taken her everywhere across the USA and Europe, including such venues and gigs as the High Sierra Music Festival, Vancouver Island Music Festival, The Kerrville Folk Festival, The Cactus Cafe (Austin, TX), The Kessler Theater (Dallas, TX), Club Passim (Boston, MA), and The Birchmere (Alexandria, VA).