“Love reading? Coffee and treats? Holiday cheer? Looking for the perfect present for that bibliophile on your gift list? Then come by the Byrne-Reed House (1410 Rio Grande Street) for Humanities Texas’s seventh annual Holiday Book Fair. On Saturday, December 12 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., talented Texas authors will visit with holiday shoppers and sign copies of their latest books, available for purchase at a discounted price. Noteworthy authors participating in this year’s festivities include H. W. Brands, Ray Benson, Jan Jarboe Russell, Katherine Howe, Brandon Caro, Don Tate, Karen Olsson, Kirk Lynn, Sarah Cortez, Louisa Hall, Steven Moss, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Michael Barnes, Jacqueline Kelly, Chris Barton, David Gaines, Elizabeth Harris, Andrew J. Torget, Dave Oliphant, Javier Auyero, Chuck Bailey, Nikki Loftin, and Light Townsend Cummins. Come by for good conversation, delicious homemade baked goods and complimentary hot coffee. Free parking will be available in the St. Martin’s Lutheran Church lot on the northwest corner of 15th and Rio Grande Streets. All proceeds from the book fair and bake sale will benefit Texas libraries.

Click here, contact us at 512-440-1991, or find us on Facebook or Twitter for more details about this event.”

The UT School of Information (iSchool) is offering more electives for you to get a taste of what information science is all about.  In some of these courses you will be sitting side by side with current graduate students so this is a great opportunity to see if graduate school is for you.  Other courses are online for your convenience.  Check out the options on iSchool Course Listings page (undergrad & grad marked): https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/courses/classes or on the UT Course Schedule under “INF.”  Feel free to register now!  For more information about the iSchool, we invite you to come to our Undergrad Open House on Monday, Nov 2nd.

iSchool Undergraduate Open House
Monday, Nov. 2nd
4:00-5:00 pm
UTA building, room 1.502 & Tocker Lounge
1616 Guadalupe St.
Treats Served – Please RSVP by clicking here.
Event Description: Come learn about the only graduate program that is open to students of all majors.  During this Open House we will tell you more about the School of Information and give you tours of our cool modern space.  We have all the benefits of a small top-ranked private school, but the backing of the UT brand and resources.

Worried about finding a job?  Career prospects for our MS Grads are phenomenal with a whopping 90% employed within 3 months of graduation in the some fields!  We have a dedicated Career Office that you are welcome to talk to about your potential path and options.

Avg. salary for All Students is $55,969;  Avg. salary for Private Sector is $65,171;  Avg. salary for UX/IA-related jobs is  $76,175    (from Class of 2014 data)

We hope to meet you next Monday or in the near future!

Best,
Tara Iagulli
Director of Career Development
tara.iagulli@austin.utexas.edu
512-471-8806

On Tuesday, October 27th, at 7 p.m., the Joynes Room will host acclaimed Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu  on a reading and Q&A. A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia, Mengestu was named a “20 under 40” writer by The New Yorker and received the National Book Award Foundation’s “5 under 35” Award for his dazzling debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. The author of three novels, Mengestu speaks with profound eloquence about the immigrant experience. While supplies last, honors students who commit to attend the reading can receive a free copy of a book by Dinaw Mengestu by inquiring in person at the front desk of the Joynes Reading Room (CRD 007).

“All Our Names” is a book about an immigrant, but more profoundly it is a story about finding out who you are, about how much of you is formed by your family and your homeland, and what happens when those things go up in smoke. There is great sadness and much hard truth in this novel, as there is everywhere in Mengestu’s fiction. But like the best storytellers, he knows that endings don’t have to be happy to be satisfying, that mysteries don’t need to be explained, that discriminating between what can and can’t be known is more than enough. And he is generous enough to imbue his characters with this awareness as well.” —Malcolm Jones, New York Times Sunday Book Review

Polymathic Scholars and the English Department presents: A lecture by Lisa May, a former program executive at NASA, on Oct. 29 at 2pm in SAC 2.302. Check out the event details here

Mat Johnson, a writer of prose and comics, will read from his new novel Loving Day in the Joynes Reading Room on October 6th at 7 p.m. Johnson’s work often addresses themes of racial identity and racial ambiguity. Listen to his interview with Terry Gross (on the NPR program Fresh Air) here. A limited number of free books by Mat Johnson are available at the front desk of the Joynes Reading Room (CRD 007) to students who inquire in person. (Also, please join the Facebook Event.)

The Joynes Literary Series at UT Austin kicks off next week with a talk by guest lecturer Amy Gentry, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 17th. This event is free and open to the public.

Dr. Gentry has been a regular book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune since 2013. Her essays and criticism have been published by Salon, the Texas Observer, The Rumpus, LA Review of Books, Gastronomica, and the Austin Chronicle. Her current projects include reporting on women’s issues for Texas Monthly, guest-curating the Awst Press fall chapbook series, and working on a novel about the idea of the “good victim.” She graduated from the UT Plan II Honors Program in 2001 and obtained her doctorate in English from the University of Chicago in 2011. The title of her Joynes lecture is “Trigger Warning: Violence and Sexual Agency in Contemporary Fiction.”

Other Joynes events this fall will include:

Sept. 18th: Poets Heather Christle and Chris Deweese
October 6th: Novelist Mat Johnson
October 22nd: Bob Dylan and the History of Rock n Roll, with writer Michael Gray
October 27th: Novelist Dinaw Mengestu
November 6th: Poets Suzanne Buffam and Srikanth Reddy

The Joynes Reading Room is located on the east side of the Carothers Building at 2501 Whitis Avenue on the University of Texas Campus. For more information, call 512-471-5787 or visit us on Facebook.