Teamwork Arts, producer of JLF USA, announced a line-up of speakers slated to address JLF Houston, scheduled between 6 – 8 September 2024. The festival is supported by partners such as Asia Society Texas, Inprint, Rothko Chapel, Eternal Gandhi Museum Houston and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The annual festival, in its 7th edition this year, embodies the spirit of its mother ship, the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), and its signature camaraderie, caravan of ideas, and conversations. As always, this year too, it returns to celebrate the distinct culture, vibrant diversity, and dynamic energy of the Bayou City.
JLF Houston promises an intellectually stimulating experience, featuring an array of speakers who will inspire audiences with their thought-provoking insights. The speaker line-up includes Alka Joshi, the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy, whose debut novel, The Henna Artist, became a New York Times bestseller and is currently being developed as a Netflix series; Bradley M Bailey, the inaugural Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Curator and Chair of Asian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, who has organized several major touring exhibitions with Meiji Modern (50 Years of New Japan is the most recent); Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an award-winning writer and professor at the University of Houston, known for her novels that include the recent An Uncommon Love, Independence, Mistress of Spices, Palace of Illusions, The Forest of Enchantments, and The Last Queen; Cristina Rivera Garza, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer; Elizabeth Hsu, the 2023-2024 Houston Youth Poet Laureate appointed by Mayor Sylvester Turner; Fady Joudah, Palestinian-American poet and physician, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Harpreet, versatile Indian artist and composer, known for his musical compositions in various Indian languages.
The list also includes John Vaillant, author of the award-winning books The Golden Spruce, The Tiger, and most recently Pulitzer Prize finalist for Fire Weather; Jose Aranda Jr, a scholar & board member of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and co-founder of Avanzamos: El Taller Chicana/o, a Rice University annual workshop focused on advanced scholarship in Chicana/o Studies, and founding director of Rice’s Program in Latin American and Latinx Studies; Kirsten Ostherr, Gladys Louise Fox professor and director of the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice University in Houston; Navdeep Suri, former Indian diplomat and acclaimed translator of his grandfather Nanak Singh’s powerful works on India’s independence struggle; Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, assistant professor at Rice University and scholar of Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literature; Ricardo Nuila, a writer, practicing doctor, and director of the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) at Baylor College of Medicine; Shashi Tharoor, bestselling Indian author and a third-term Member of Parliament; Shekhar Kapur, filmmaker known for his contributions to Indian and international cinema; and Sunjay R Devarajan, academic and medical researcher at Baylor College of Medicine.
JLF Houston 2024 will be a remarkable celebration of books and ideas reflecting the multi-cultural spirit of Houston.
