28th ASU’s Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton
2601 W. Avenue N
Price: Free
Date: March 6, 2025 to March 7, 2025
Time: 9:30 am
The 2025 conference will commemorate the 28th Angelo State University Writers Conference in Honor of Elmer Kelton. Our two-day conference brings award-winning authors from all genres to campus to share their works and their creativity with the ASU community and the public. It is one of the few in the state that requires no registration fees for presenters and guests.
This year’s featured writer is award-winning poet Jenny Browne. Browne is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. She is the author of five books of poetry, and two chapbooks, including “Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems” (TCU Press 2021) and “I Am Trying to Love the Whole World,” forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026, as well as the editor of “Texas, Being: A State of Poems” (Maverick Press 2024).
A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas-Austin, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two U.S./U.K. Fullbright Fellowships to the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her poems and essays have appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Oxford American, Poem-a-Day, Poetry Magazine, The Nation and The New York Times. She served concurrent terms as the 2016-18 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. Browne’s keynote addresses will take place on Thursday, March 6, at the following:
9:30 a.m.
“A Conversation with Jenny Browne,” C.J. Davidson Conference Center, Houston Harte University Center
4:30 p.m.
“Reading and Presentation by Jenny Browne,” C.J. Davidson Conference Center, Houston Harte University Center
Additionally, local and regional writers will showcase their works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and prose. Their 50-minute panel presentations will take place from 1-4PM on Thursday, March 6, and 10AM-1PM on Friday, March 7. All panel presentations will be conducted in the Eldon Black Recital Hall in the Carr Education-Fine Arts Building.
For presenter and panel details, please visit the Event Link.
The conference is held every year in honor of the late Elmer Kelton, who wrote more than 40 books, including “The Time it Never Rained,” “The Man Who Rode Midnight” and “The Good Old Boys.” He was a seven-time winner of the Western Writers of America’s (WWA) Spur Award, and the WWA named him the “all-time best Western author.” The event is hosted by the Natalie Zan Ryan Department of English and Modern Languages and sponsored by the university with support from the ASU Alumni Association, the College of Arts and Humanities, and Guy and Eva Choate.