Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, presents poet brittny ray crowell and fiction writer Nina McConigley, former Inprint Fellowship and Prize recipients and alumnae of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP), on Monday, May 4, 2026, 7:30 pm, as the season finale of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.

The event will be held at the Alley Theatre. crowell will read from her debut poetry collection Cord Swell, and McConigley will share her debut novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, followed by an on-stage conversation led by UH CWP director and Texas Poet Laureate Kevin Prufer, as well as a book signing in the lobby. The festive and poignant evening will also mark the final Inprint reading hosted by Rich Levy, Inprint’s longtime, outgoing Executive Director, who is retiring after 31 impactful years in the role. General admission tickets are $5. Free tickets for students and senior citizens are available upon request. Books will be on sale at a discount at the event through Brazos Bookstore. For tickets and details, visit the Inprint website at inprint.org.

brittny ray crowell is a poet, artist, and assistant professor at Clark Atlanta University. Winner of an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, crowell received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Common, Copper Nickel, The Journal, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and her work as a librettist has been featured as part of the Kennedy Center’s Cartography Project. Cord Swell, crowell’s ambitious and inventive debut poetry collection, is a pilgrimage of poems, stories, voices, and mixed-media collage through the lives of three generations of Black women from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. Nick Flynn calls the book “an altar, a praise song to women…who survive―some as witness, some as memory, some as a recipe for gravy.” A. Van Jordan describes these poems as “heirlooms passed down to us, bolstering strength through every challenge.”

Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which won the PEN/Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and recently received its world premiere. McConigley’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Salon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and a winner of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Nonfiction Prize.

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is McConigley’s bold and fiercely original debut novel, set in 1986 rural Wyoming, about a pair of Indian-American teenage sisters who plot to murder a newly immigrated uncle. At its heart, the tale is a moving story of sisterhood, a playful ode to the 80s, a murder mystery (of sorts), and a powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence. Celeste Ng writes, “I have been waiting for Nina McConigley’s debut novel for years, and it’s even better than I could have imagined.”

The series is presented by Inprint, a Houston-based literary arts nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers. Since 1980, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series has featured more than 400 of the world’s great writers from 40 countries, including winners of 13 Nobel Prizes, 74 Pulitzer Prizes, 71 National Book Awards, and 19 Booker Prizes, as well as 23 U.S. Poets Laureate. The series and Inprint receive generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation, The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Bookstore and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Special thanks to Winpark.

For more information, visit inprint.org or call 713.521.2026.