Art Is Life by Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic
Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, Hilma af Klint, and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons and Maria Abramović; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Described by Sotheby’s Institute of Art as “the art critic,” Saltz provides a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent times.
Tuesday, January 24, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
New York Times bestselling author
Fiona Davis returns with
The Magnolia Palace, a tantalizing novel that explores secrets, betrayal, and murder within the Frick residence, one of New York’s most prominent Gilded Age mansions. Spanning decades, the novel brings to center stage the often-overlooked presence of women as muses in art history. Davis’s many novels include
The Lions of Fifth Avenue, which features the New York Public Library.
In conversation with Mark Castro
Tuesday, January 31, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
Under the Whispering Door by
TJ Klune has been described as
A Man Called Ove meets
The Good Place. Klune’s signature warmth, humor, and empathy is on full display in this moving story about a man who discovers the joys of living after he is dead. Klune is the Lambda Award–winning author of numerous books, including the
New York Times bestseller
The House in the Cerulean Sea.
February 2023
Saturday, February 4, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
Selected Shorts returns to the Dallas Museum of Art with an evening of stories devoted to new friends, chosen family, and the sometimes fraught stages in between. Actors of stage and screen perform funny, moving, captivating short fiction about finding and holding on to your people. Tony Award–winning actors
Michael Cerveris and
John Benjamin Hickey join
Cindy Cheung to bring stories about friendship to life on stage.
In conversation with David McCloskey
Tuesday, February 14, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
Edgar-nominated writer
Kathleen Kent presents
Black Wolf, a Russian spy thriller about a female CIA agent whose extraordinary powers of facial recognition lead her into the dangerous heart of the Soviet Union. Based in part on Kent’s experiences as a U.S. Department of Defense contractor,
Black Wolf probes the divide between two nations and a woman pushed to her breaking point.
David McCloskey, author of the spy thriller
Damascus Station, is a former CIA officer.
Tuesday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
I Have Some Questions for You by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist
Rebecca Makkai is both a transfixing mystery and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past. When successful film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane's alma mater invites her back to teach a two-week course, she finds herself inexorably drawn to a case involving the 1995 murder of a classmate and its increasingly apparent flaws.
March 2023
Thursday March 23, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
Adam Gopnik, three-time National Magazine Award–winning critic of art, food, France, and more, recently became obsessed with wondering how the people he was writing about learned their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf. In
The Real Work, Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor, to try his hand at things he assumed were beyond him.
April 2023
Tuesday, April 11, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
“One of the most compulsive and captivating novels in recent memory” (The Washington Post), The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab follows the eponymous lead, born in 18th-century France, who makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. She traverses continents, centuries, and moments in history and art as a woman striving to make her mark, but whom no one remembers.
Sunday, April 16, 7:30 p.m.
Location: McFarlin Auditorium, SMU
Master of satire
David Sedaris returns to Arts & Letters Live for the 12th year to read new and unpublished material. Sedaris is beloved for his personal essays and short stories, with more than 16 million copies of his books in print, including
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003–2020) and his latest collection,
Happy-Go-Lucky. In 2020 the New York Public Library voted
Me Talk Pretty One Day one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years.
Great (Women) Painters
Wednesday, April 19, 6:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, will facilitate a panel discussion with several female artists who will discuss Great (Women) Painters, a sumptuous survey of over 300 women painters and their work spanning almost five centuries. This groundbreaking book champions a more diverse history of art, showcasing well-known women painters from history, such as Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, and Elaine de Kooning, and today’s most exciting rising stars, including Tamara de Lempicka and Yayoi Kusama.
Geraldine Brooks
Tuesday, June 20, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Horchow Auditorium
A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history in her latest novel, Horse. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, this riveting tale weaves together art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.
