Author Stephen Graham Jones Reads From ‘Growing Up Dead in Texas’

Event Description

An investigation of the places we're from, and the places we still live when we close our eyes, "Growing Up Dead in Texas" explores small-town life, family, and what it really means to go home.

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton.

Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction.

And nobody was ever caught.

Greenwood just leaned forward into next year’s work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Now, Stephen's going back. His first time back since he graduated high school, and maybe his last. For answers, for closure, for the people who can’t go back. For the ones who never got to leave.

Part mystery, part memoir, Growing Up Dead in Texas is packed with more secrets than your average graveyard. Stephen Graham Jones’ breakout novel is a story about Texas. It’s a story about farming. A story about finally standing up from the dead and walking away.

Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Born in West Texas in 1972, Stephen Graham Jones earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy at Texas Tech University and an M.A. at University of North Texas. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University in 1998. Since then he won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and other awards. Recently he served as an associate professor of English at Texas Tech University; he is now an associate professor of English at University of Colorado at Boulder. Lonegan’s Luck was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist. At public readings he's said that his short story "Bestiary" isn't fiction.