The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Lauren D. Woods

Description

Join us on Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, via Zoom for a conversation with Lauren D. Woods, to discuss her new book, The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe (Autumn House Press). Moderated by Michael Don, author of the story collection Partners and Strangers.

Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths—joyful, whimsical, even absurd—through the world.

A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left.

In the worlds Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe urges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms.

About the Author

Lauren D. Woods, originally from the Dallas area, lives and writes in Washington, DC, where she was a 2024–25 DC Arts and Humanities Fellow in Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Best Small Fictions, The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She works in consulting and lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a guinea pig. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe is her debut collection.