The San Antonio Book Festival celebrates national and local authors and their contributions to the culture of literacy, ideas, and imagination. The festival takes place all day on Saturday, May 21, located downtown at the Central Library (600 Soledad Street) and the neighboring Southwest School of Art.

The free, daylong event is a gift to visitors and the citizens of San Antonio, bringing books to life through author presentations, innovative panel discussions, and book sales and signings. Also included in this fun day of literary entertainment are family activities such as children’s theater performances, a technology area, interactive play and art stations, and a selection of the city’s famous food trucks.

Two UNP authors will be presenting their new books: Suzanne Ohlmann and Tomás Q. Morín! Information on both of their panels and book signings is below.

Secrets and Shadows

Suzanne Ohlmann – Shadow Migration

12:15 to 1:15 p.m. at the Latino Collection Resource Center

Start of Signing: 1:30 p.m. at the Festival Market Place

Suzanne Ohlmann is a registered nurse. A native Nebraskan, she currently lives in San Antonio with her husband and a quintet of dogs and cats. Her work has been published by the Associated Press, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Longreads, and Texas Monthly.

In Shadow Migration with her feet firmly rooted on the plains of Nebraska, Suzanne Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America’s Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann’s eyes and to discover with her the pain she’d been avoiding through her boomerang travels away from her native home.

Obsessed with Texas

Tomás Q. Morín – Let Me Count the Ways

12:15 – 1:15 p.m. at the Texas Monthly Terrace

Start of Signing: 1:30 p.m. at the Festival Marketplace

Tomás Q. Morín is on the faculty at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country. He is the coeditor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Slate, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Narrative. He is a National Endowment of the Arts fellow.

Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín’s compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.