Arts & Letters Live, the venerable in-house literary series at the Dallas Museum of Art, announced its 2009 season. With 26 programs over a six-month period, Carolyn Bess and her team will be busy bringing the best and brightest of the book world to North Texas.

You know how you can learn a lot about a person by what they keep on their desk or what they write in their planner? You can play that game with the Arts & Letters Live season, too. Learn who you are by the names that make you squeal. I squealed for Alex Ross and David Sedaris, yet I’m intrigued by the pop-up book guy (and wondering if I can use pop-up book making strategies to decorate my duplex). Pop-up book guy will be leading creativity challenges in the Center for Creative Connections when he is here. He has a real name too (Robert Sabuda - rhymes with Pablo Neruda, but that may be a coincidence).

Here’s the rundown:

January - Stephanie Kallos, novelist, Broken for You and Sing Them Home; Sir Ken Robinson, author, The Element and Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative; David Macaulay, author and illustrator, The Way Things Work, The Way We Work and Pyramid; Wally Lamb, novelist, She’s Come Undone and The Hour I First Believed

Alex Ross

February - Jonathan Stroud, fantasy novelist, The Bartimaeus Trlogy and Heroes of the Valley; Texas Bound from Broadway: Food Fictions; Alex Ross, music critic and author, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century; Abraham Verghese, memoirist and novelist, Cutting for Stone, The Tennis Partner and My Own Country; Elizabeth Gilbert, memoirist, Eat, Pray, Love

March - Ian McEwan, novelist, Atonement; Judy Schachner, children’s author and illustrator, the Skippyjon Jones series, and R. L. LaFevers, children’s author, Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos;Texas Bound I; Dr. Zahi Hawass, archaeologist and lecturer, “Mysteries of Tutankhamun Revealed”

David Sedaris

April - M. T. Anderson, novelist, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing; Arthur Phillips, novelist, The Egyptologist and The Song is You; David Sedaris, satirist, memoirist, NPR superstar, This American Life (radio) and When You Are Engulfed in Flames

May - Sherman Alexie, novelist, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Colson Whitehead, novelist, The Intuitionist; Linda Sue Park, poet and children’s novelist, A Single Shard and Keeping Score; Texas Bound: The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009; Tony Horwitz, journalist and author, A Voyage Long and Strange, and David Grann, journalist, The Lost City of Z; Kathleen Kent, novelist, The Heretic’s Daughter, and Cristina Henriquez, novelist, The World in Half; Robert Sabuda, pop-up book artist, Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

June - Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon, authors of Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West; Texas Bound II; Sara Gruen, novelist, Water for Elephants and Ape House; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, novelist, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, and Alexandra Fuller, author, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood and Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier.

Tickets are available online (first time ever!), by mail, or by telephone. And in case you’re putting off those Sedaris tickets, his McFarlin Auditorium appearance is already half sold out and the guy isn’t here for four more months, and he’ll be reading all new material.
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