Indie-Love from the NY Times
Former Membership Director Steph Opitz (now Literary Director at the Texas Book Festival) gets quoted in the NY Times, talking about Austin's "burgeoned" lit scene.
I would say that Austin is beyond burgeoning — it’s already burgeoned,” said Steph Opitz, the literary director of the Texas Book Festival, and the former membership director for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses in New York. Ms. Opitz compared Austin to Minneapolis (where the venerable small presses Graywolf, Milkweed Editions and Coffee House Press have headquarters) and to Portland, Ore. (where Tin House Books is based).
AWESOME. Also awesome? Member-publisher A Strange Object, publisher of Kelly Luce's wonderful debut collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail. They are killing it with their first major release.
In choosing a name for their new literary press, A Strange Object, Callie Collins and Jill Meyers turned to a quotation from an early Donald Barthelme short story, “Florence Green Is 81.” In the story, a character describes the aim of literature as “the creation of a strange object covered in fur which breaks your heart...“I think books are becoming an increasingly strange object in the same way vinyl records are now strange objects,” said Ms. Collins.
Congrats all! So proud.
