In Conversation: David Wright Faladé & Alejandro Puyana

Join us in Austin Central Library's Gallery for a conversation with David Wright Faladé and Alejandro Puyana.

The event will celebrate the publication of Wright Faladé's latest novel, The New Internationals, a stunning historical novel set in a post-WWII Paris filled with possibility that interweaves a coming-of-age story, a cross-cultural romance, and a portrait of the international youth at a definitive moment in contemporary history.

He will be joined in conversation by Alejandro Puyana, discussing his debut, Freedom is a Feast, a multigenerational, Latin American saga of love and revolution in which a rebel who commits a youthful betrayal receives a late-life chance at redemption and a new life.

Both novels draw inspiration from the authors' family histories. Wright Faladé and Puyana will discuss how they transformed these stories into imaginative, ambitious works of fiction.

Wright Faladé and Puyana will sign books following the program. Books will be available for purchase thanks to Black Pearl Books.

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David Wright Faladé is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of the novel Black Cloud Rising and co-author of the young adult novel Away Running and the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. The recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, he has written for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Southern Review, Newsday, and more.

Alejandro Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The American Scholar, and elsewhere, and his story Hands of Dirty Children was reprinted in Best American Short Stories. He lives with his wife (the writer Brittani Sonnenberg) and daughter in Austin, Texas. His first novel Freedom Is a Feast will be published by Little, Brown in August 2024.

Host or Publisher Texas Book Festival