Articles and information about The Wittliff’s Southwestern Writers Collection.
“Joe Lansdale is a great writer who can kill you not only with words, but with his hands.” So begins this feisty documentary, All Hail the Popcorn King, which celebrates the virtuoso writer from Nacogdoches Texas — a man whose vision is so original he even developed his own brand of martial arts. Although I’m …
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The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University have acquired the complete archive of internationally acclaimed author John Rechy, praised as “one of the few original American writers of the last century,” by Gore Vidal, and as “one of Mexican‑American literature’s founding authors” by critic Héctor Calderón. Rechy’s first novel, City of Night, was published in …
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The Wittliff is proud to share the news that Naomi Shihab Nye has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. This is the highest honor given by the TIL, which was established in 1936 to recognize and celebrate the state’s literary artists. The award will be presented to Nye at the …
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Last November at the annual “Dobie Dichos” literary festival in South Texas, I got to meet William Allison, a Houston attorney who specializes in environmental law and who has emerged as one of the great modern collectors of J. Frank Dobie material. Bill told me that his grandfather introduced him to Dobie, which set him …
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The Wittliff is excited to announce that you will soon be able to hear in-depth interviews with your favorite Wittliff authors, thanks to a new partnership with “Bookmarked,” the weekly radio program hosted by Priscilla Leder on San Marcos radio station KZSM. “Bookmarked” presents a lively literary discussion led by Leder, who is a Distinguished …
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In 1963, shortly after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Bill Wittliff and his wife, Sally, founded the Encino Press on the kitchen table of their Dallas apartment. The press focused on regional material about Texas and the Southwest, taking advantage of Bill’s editing, book design, photography, and illustration skills to produce finely …
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The epic sweep of Texas history has inspired classic novels by many of our greatest writers, and the Wittliff Collections showcases the best of this work in its new exhibition, Literary Frontiers: Historical Fiction & the Creative Imagination. Texas writers have illuminated the human stories at the heart of legends and myths, from the trail …
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Scholars of Texas, U.S. and world history can now access an innovative online resource that showcases the earliest written account of Texas and the Southwest. Texas State University Libraries and The Wittliff Collections today launched a website celebrating La relación, a book written by Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and originally published in …
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In summer 2015, the Wittliff Collections acquired the major literary archive of author, Sandra Cisneros. As one of America’s leading writers, Cisneros helped launch the Latino literary boom and is the author of poetry, a memoir, essays, children’s books, and fiction – including the internationally acclaimed The House on Mango Street. In October – just …
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(originally published Fall 2005) Editor’s note: This article has been slightly updated to reflect that Sam Shepard passed away in 2017. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Academy Award®-nominated actor Sam Shepard was not normally thought of as a “Southwesterner,” yet an extraordinary collection of his archives is held in the Wittliff Collections. “Sam is of the …
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