I’m heading to San Antonio this week to help honor NBCC Balakian award winning critic Steve Kellman, who will be top dog at this year’s Thursday night, September 25, blowout for the South Texas literary center Gemini Ink. Kellman will receive Gemini Ink’s annual Literary Excellence Award.
Kellman won the National Book Critics Circle’s highest award, the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, in 2007. (Read why here.) A popular professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Kellman was Gemini Ink’s founding board president. The Southwest School of Art and Craft’s book arts department has produced a handmade letterpress chapbook of Kellman’s critical wit for the occasion. (You can read his “In Retrospect” on Nabokov’s “Lectures on Literature” for Critical Mass here.) For those in South Texas that night, Gemini Ink promises vintage boleros, a silent auction, and literary diva and Trinity sage Coleen Grissom as emcee. Tickets are $100 per person, details at 210.734.9673.