Join First Light at Harry Ransom Center for the launch of Bret Anthony Johnston's new book Encounters with Unexpected Animals (2026), moderated by Stephen Harrigan.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Remember Me Like This and the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation, and The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning and is the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Texas, Johnston is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.

Stephen Harrigan is the author of fourteen books of fiction and non-fiction, including the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, and the recent Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century. His work as a journalist and essayist has appeared in many national magazines, and especially in Texas Monthly, for which he is a writer-at-large and longtime contributor. Many of his magazine pieces are collected in the books The Eye of the Mammoth and last year’s An Anchor in the Sea of Time. He is also an award-winning screenwriter who has written many movies for television. He lives and works in Austin.

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Presented by HRC and co-sponsored by the Texas Book Festival. Register to attend through the HRC event page linked above.