If you missed out on the Beer Can Opener last Friday (because you were embroiled in the LRPC - any other excuse will not be accepted, unless accompanied by a note from your Dr.), you have a second chance to attend a special event. Join Mayor Bill White as he honors and officially opens the Beer Can House to the public, along with the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art. This Thursday, March 6th at......

Monday? Really? AGAIN? Not buying it. Ugh. Let us help you though it with a little spoken word for a rainy day. Join the Rice University English Department as they welcome Steve Gehrke and Nadine Meyer, husband and wife and both winners of the 2005 National Poetry Series, as part of the Cherry Reading Series. Both Gehrke and Meyer have been widely published and recognized for their poetic work. Gehrke is an assistant professor of......

Antonya Nelson, one of our resident writer geniuses here in town, recently placed *another* story in the New Yorker, and it takes place in Houston! Get a load of that! The story is called "Shauntrelle." Here are the opening lines: "It isn’t just a husband you divorce but a life. A credit rating. Certain friends—sadly, some of them small children. A mother-in-law, that innocent bystander. And sometimes it seemed to Constance that she had divorced......

The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art will soon be conducting a nationwide search for a new Executive Director, as Susanne Theis will be leaving August 31st to become the new Programming Director of Discovery Green, which opens in early 2008. Susanne has been with The Orange Show for more than 20 years. Under her guidance, The Orange Show has garnered international recognition for the world's largest and oldest Art Car Parade and each of......

The Big Read is a program started by the National Endowment for the Arts in order to "create a nation of readers." The program aims to combat the decline of reading for recreation and reading as a community. Be honest, when was the last time you visited your local library? Uh-huh, that's what we thought. The idea behind this program is to pick one book and encourage everyone in a community to read it, then......

This post comes to us from Austinist's Shannon Roberts. In the last month, we started a discussion about the potentially critically-damaging impact that the dissolution or restructuring of the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) could have on Texas' arts and cultural organizations. (here and here) This week, we interviewed Ricardo Hernandez, the Executive Director of the Texas Commission on the Arts, and Jennifer Wijangco, the Deputy Director of the Texas Cultural Trust to get......