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Unmasking the Klansman
This story seems hard to believe: One man was an Alabama klansman whose speechwriting made George Wallace a national figure. The other was a best-selling New Age Native American author in Texas. They...
View ArticleThe Texas Observer’s 2023 Must-Read Lone Star Books
Despite a disturbing rise in book bans, Texas is, against all odds, becoming more and more of a literary hub with authors winning accolades, indie bookstores popping up from Galveston Island to El...
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What Does the United States Owe Central America?
The heart of Jonathan Blitzer’s new book about Central America is a heart doctor. Born in the 1950s in El Salvador, Juan Romagoza was drawn to medicine by something like a religious calling. By the...
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Border Angels and Magic Moments
Sergio Chapa’s photos and a portion of this text also appear in Frontera: A Journey Across the US-Mexico Border and are reprinted with permission from TCU Press. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and I met...
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San Fernando: The Last Stop
Editor’s note: Marcela Turati, one of Mexico’s finest investigative journalists, a winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and cofounder of the investigative nonprofit Quinto Elemento Lab, has spent...
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The Cancer Factory
Jim Morris, a seasoned investigative journalist from Texas and the founder of the nonprofit Public Health Watch, has a brand new (and scary) book about corporations concealing workplace hazards that...
View ArticleTexas Mother-Daughter Books Are More a Shot of Whiskey than a Sip of Tea
I’m going to admit something to all y’all: the best thing that has ever happened to me—becoming a mother—is also the absolute worst. When my daughter was born, I was unprepared for the overwhelming...
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The Booksellers’ Revolt
January 17 was a big day for opponents of book bans in Texas schools. Charley Rejsek, CEO of indie bookstore BookPeople, had just returned home from a routine meeting at the Austin Central Library....
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A Roadmap to Rebuilding Communities
When we think of what our communities need, we usually think of affordable homes, good schools, and grocery stores. Not wide towering highways. Yet, in the past 70-some years, highways have dictated...
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Saving Lone Star Literary Life
Out in West Texas, a pair of aspiring novelists and enterprising small-town newspaper owners, Barbara Brannon and Kay Ellington, were dismayed by the number of publications that were dropping book...
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‘Forever Chemicals,’ Religion, and Family Tragedy in Texas
Editor’s Note: This excerpt is adapted from Loose of Earth: A Memoir (April 2024) with permission from University of Texas Press. The Environmental Protection Agency announced limits on PFAS in...
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Surviving Baptistland
Christa Brown, a former Texas appellate attorney, is revered as perhaps the best-known of the brave women (and men) who blew the whistle on abusive clergy and coverups at churches in the powerful...
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Rick’s Requiem: The Serious Impact of an Unserious Politician
It’s been a decade since the pride of Paint Creek, James Richard Perry—yes, that’s Rick—occupied the Texas governor’s mansion. In that time, Perry launched a second failed presidential bid, cha-cha’ed...
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‘The Chicano Time Traveler’
Introduction by Lise Olsen El Paso author Daniel Chacón likes to weave stories and dream up characters in the middle of ordinary episodes of life. The titular character of his new short story...
View Article‘In All My Childhood Dreams, I Was a Boy’
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted, with permission, from Pretty: A Memoir by KB Brookins. The book, out May 28 from Alfred A. Knopf, blends prose and poetry. Before the Texas heat could cut...
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A Small-Town Texas Librarian’s Big Stand Against Book Bans
Suzette Baker, from unincorporated Kingsland, was feted recently by the Authors Guild in New York City as a “Champion of Writers”—the first-ever recipient of a national award established to honor...
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‘Tech Doesn’t Just Stay at the Border’: Petra Molnar on Surveillance’s Long...
Petra Molnar is an anthropologist and attorney focused on human rights and migration. Molnar, who is based in Toronto, serves as the associate director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab and as a...
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The Banality of Border Evil
William Hanson is not your typical biographical subject. Dead for nearly a century now, Hanson was never famous, nor did he ever hold elected office. He was not an underappreciated artist or a...
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Bringing Home the Story of Ben Spencer
Barbara Bradley Hagerty is an eclectic journalist: In her working life at NPR and later at The Atlantic, she has relentlessly pursued stories that somehow connect the divergent tent poles of religion...
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Stories from Deep in the Heart
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from Native Texan: Stories from Deep in the Heart, a collection of former Texas Observer editor Joe Holley’s columns out this July from Trinity University...
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