Events

Our next book club selection is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, a gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries

This event will be in person

Find this book in our bookstore or get it delivered to your home from our online store

You can also join our Goodreads group here!

Let’s meet up and talk Literature!

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Join us for a very special anniversary celebration, our dear friends from Deep Vellum are turning 10 years and we are turning 9, so how about throwing an all out party to enjoy all the things we love!

A full day event with mind blowing literature, afrobeat rhythms, cumbia, hip hop, art vendors, tattoos, book sales and international DJs.

Here is the program, join us anytime, the event is free and open to everyone. You can RSVP HERE

Mind blowing literature with Mircea Cărtărescu & Sean Cotter (Romania & USA)

Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu and translator San Cotter will discuss the process of writing and translating Solenoid, considered by many one of the greatest novels of the 21^st century. This event is possible thanks to the Romanian Cultural Institute.

Afrobeats with Baba Kuboye (Nigeria)

Babatunmida Kuboye is an Afrobeat artist based in the United States. He is the son of jazz legends, Fran & Tunde Kuboye, and grandnephew of the late Afrobeat King, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Baba Kuboye, whose earliest musical influence came from growing up at the renowned Jazz 38 club Lagos Nigeria, with his parents, is a chip off the old block with his socially conscious voice running through his music

Cumbia with Papi Chulo (Dallas)

The four-piece Dallas band created a new subgenre it calls cumbia artesanal, which it compares to a craft beer made from each member’s musical interests. Anything goes, so long as its foundation is cumbia. The percussion-heavy traditional dance music is the most popular genre in Latin America. and Papi Chulo takes from its history and own influences to accomplish one thing: It just wants to make people dance. Simple.

X – The Pop Up! A black experimental music series curated by Mattie. (with Mons, Vøhn and Joshua Miller)

By using introspective visuals, lyrical self-inquiry, solful melodics, experimental instrumentation, MATTIE guides her audience into a visual and sonic world of duality. MONS is a hard to pin artist & human. with introspective lyrics, intimite rap and experimental sounds influenced by jazz, r&b, rap, electronic and rock; they create a transcendental sonic experience. VØHN is an alternative soul/hip hop artist whose music is based in the story of human exploration and trippy sound discovery. We call his music big bags! JOSHUA MILLER is a free improvisational saxophonist/drummer with deep Ft Worth Texas roots. his delivery is unexplainable, and completely open to interpretation of the listener.

Afro Latin rhythms with Elkin Pautt (Colombia)

Colombian Music Producer, based in Dallas TX via Brooklyn, NY. Since early childhood captivated by music, curiosity made him his own teacher. West African influenced music that incorporates Electronica and analog synthesis makes a strong combination of sounds reflected in his work. The DJ sets travel around the world exploring exotic sounds from Afro-house to soukous, Latin grooves to Afrobeats, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and more.

Electronic beats with DJ Tempranillo (Madrid)

From the nights of Madrid we’re bringing our old friend and TWD collaborator, Dj Tempranillo.

Book Sale by Deep Vellum

Our dearest publishing company will be onsite with special offers and discounts for some of the amazing titles they publish every year

Special Bookish tattoos with Gino Dal Cin & Kristin Wright!!!

Goods from Everything Ellum & Street-ish

Art by Angelic Vortex, Jess Stewart, Paige Blaylock and The Ruby Co

Free RSVP

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Mark your calendars, another Dallas Noir At The Bar is coming to The Wild Detectives featuring an amazing line up!

Gift card prizes at the door!!!

See you at the bar!

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This workshop leads participants through a series of writing exercises exploring the role that prepositions and directions play in the processes of grief and healing. Much of the time, the language we use assumes a linear and time-bound process that doesn’t match our complicated experiences of grief. Together, we’ll write to find more productive angles in which to view and move through loss.

FREE RSVP

Alysia Nicole Harris, Ph.D. is a poet, linguist, international performer, arts writer, and charismatic follower of Jesus. She is the author of the chapbook How Much We Must Haved Looked Like Stars to Stars, a collegiate and youth poetry slam champion, and founding member of the spoken word collective The Strivers Row. Alysia has performed in over 20 countries and now lives in Corsicana, TX where she serves as Scalawag‘s Arts & Soul Editor-At-Large. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in Linguistics and her MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.

Grief, like good poetry, isn’t linear. It’s rarely straightforward, often confusing. It circles and lifts, eddies and fades, then comes back all the sudden to punch you in the gut when you least expect it. Sometimes it’s furious, sometimes persistent, and sometimes even sweet.

Most of language fails us when it comes to grief, which is why we need a practice of reviving the basic tools we have to talk about what we’ve gone through, are still going through.

Poetry can be that practice: messy, personal, reaching, revelatory.

For National Poetry Month, Scalawag takes our grief and other loves on the road; We’re hosting writing workshops with poets across the South to create spaces we can gather in community where we can struggle to find the words together.

FREE RSVP

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Join us for a very special evening with Damien Jurado and Chris Pureka

Find your tickets HERE

Doors 7pm

Show 8pm

“Play on, there’s no such thing as better days,” Damien Jurado sings on “Roger,” the sweeping wash of a song that opens Reggae Film Star, his 18th full length album and second release from Jurado’s own Maraqopa Records label. But as he enters his 25th year as a recording artist, it’s clear these are, at the least, very good days for Jurado on the creative front. In these 12 songs, which evoke half-recalled dreams and overheard conversations, the cosmic rushes headlong into the autobiographical and specific moments on the clock fade from past to future to scenes set only in the eternal now.

Playing out like a backlot documentary filmed on the location of an unnamed TV or film set—maybe a sitcom taping, or perhaps it’s a low budget science fiction B-movie, or could it be a talk show?—the album is populated by performers awaiting call times, camera operators praying for their shot, and studio audiences rapt with anticipation. The stars here eschew glitz and glamor. Instead, they wander grocery stores and parking lots in the verdant Pacific Northwest and the desert Southwest, looking for payphones and a sense of purpose.

Produced by Jurado with multi-instrumentalist Josh Gordon and recording engineer Alex Bush at Sonikwire studio in Irvine,CA, Jurado’s home away from home and musical headquarters, the record’s compositions are among the most musically rich in his vast discography, encompassing romantic AM gold, ‘60s psychedelia, driving rock & roll, Latin shuffles, and left of the dial ambiance. Strings swell, melodic bass bubbles, and piano sparkles, undergirding Jurado’s unmistakable voice, at once intimately present and ghostly, grounded in the here and now but capable, at any moment, of drifting off into the divinatory. Following threads established by 2021’s The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, the album sees Jurado embracing his auteur era, penning vignettes that arrive with little fanfare and depart quicker than you might suspect, only to linger long after they wrap.

Seeking a skeleton key to decipher the action is beside the point—Jurado’s songs are worlds meant to be lived in, not picked apart—but on the beatific single “What Happened To The Class Of ‘65?” the singer imagines himself as both the viewer and the viewed, the eye behind the camera and its subject. This emotional and spiritual transference animates Reggae Film
Star. Like a masterful director, Jurado offers motivation to the listener, staring unblinkingly from the mise-en-scène in your mind. “Look into the camera,” he commands on “The Day Of The Robot,” “One more time with anger/And sadness/I believe you.”

A quarter-century in, Jurado remains gripped by his visions and driven by an unmatched creative drive. Reggae Film Star is one of Damien Jurado’s finest works to date, a stunning new feature from one of indie rock’s most cinematic figures. Here on this sound stage, you are the camera, you are the scene, you are the setting, and you are the viewer. Please try not to blink.

-Jason P. Woodbury

TICKETS

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Join us for a very special evening with Jake Xerxes Fusell. Find your tickets HERE

“Fussell is creating his own legacy within the long lineage of traditional folk musicians and storytellers that have come before him.” – NY Times

“So elegant … relaxing in the way that pondering a Zen koan is relaxing, and sweet in the way that the wounded, honey-voiced blues of Miss. John Hurt are sweet.” – Pitchfork

“Music that resides at the seams of Appalachia and the cosmos.” – NPR

“The folk musician’s latest album is a bittersweet collection full of silence and space. Delivered with empathy, his historical subject matter feels rooted in the present.” – Pitchfork (7.7 album review)

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia. By re contextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways. The robust burr of his voice, which periodically melts and catches at a particularly tender turn of phrase, and the swung rhythmic undertow of exquisite, seemingly effortless guitar-playing pull new valences of meaning from ostensibly antique songs and subjects.

Fussell’s new album Good and Green Again is set for release on Jan 21, 2022 via Paradise of Bachelors. Produced by James Elkington, Good and Green Again navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes and is his most conceptually focused and breathtakingly rendered to-date. Fussell and Elkington enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham, North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular band members Casey Toll on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.
If overall Good and Green Again sounds a little sadder and slower than Fussell’s past records, well, maybe we’re all a little sadder and slower these days. A smoldering mood of regret and loss pervades, a distinct vibe of vanitas. But three airy instrumentals, all Fussell originals, punctuate the program, offering respite and light in the form of crisp, shuffling play-party tunes, each in turn somewhat more hopeful and exuberant than the last. Their resemblance to lullabies is, perhaps, not coincidental. Fussell and his partner welcomed their first child into the world during the making of Good and Green Again. These lovely songs bear that promise in letters of bright gold.

TICKETS

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Join us for the launch of The Greatest Song with Kevin Griffin!

Kevin Griffin is a world-renowned, multi-platinum recording artist, producer, and #1 songwriter whose songs have been performed and recorded by artists such as Taylor Swift, Sugarland, Dierks Bently, Blondie, Train, Daughtry, Christina Perri, The Beach Boys, Meatloaf and many more. His cumulative tally of album and song sales exceed 30 million copies and have been streamed over a billion times!

This is a ticketed event, each ticket is valid for up to TWO guests and includes ONE copy of the book ¨The Greatest Song¨ that will be handed at the entrance of the event. GET YOUR TICKET HERE

Inspired by Griffin’s life and career. The Greatest Song combines sharp business advice with the compelling narrative of fictional singer/songwriter Jake Stark. After being dropped as writer for MegaMusic Publishing, Stark thinks that his career is over. That is until eccentric young billionaire Sir Daniel Smith-Daniels swoops in and offers Stark an opportunity at his avant-garde publishing house, The Row. In order to secure a contract with this publisher, Stark must complete the five music-writing trials of The Method, each demonstrating a key component in both getting and keeping success. What Stark realizes after completing The Method is that he has the tools to make the metaphorical song of, not just his career, but also his life … the Greatest Song

Griffin has been in the music business for nearly 30 years, experiencing the highs and lows of songwriting and being a musician. Though he’s had numerous platinum albums, he’s had his share of setbacks in this famously fickle industry. When asked to give talks to organizations such as Live Nation, Disney, and Nike on how he’s managed to stick around and remain relevant all these years, Griffin realized that there are actually five practices he does on a daily basis to keep his edge in the game of music. He outlines these steps in his debut creative nonfiction book,
THE GREATEST SONG: Spark Creativity, Ignite Your Career, and Transform Your Life (Brown Books Publishing Group; on sale: April 25, 2023). With The Greatest Song, Griffin aims to share his successful method with anyone, anywhere, who wants to continue growing and evolving in their career and in life

GET YOUR TICKET HERE

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Join us for the Book Launch Party of Across Both Sides of the Mirror with Bianca Pensy Aba

This is a free event!

Dance and music performances. Book excerpt reading. Spoken word. Author interview. Poetry. Book signing. Afrobeats. And much more!

First 40 to RSVP will get a FREE DRINK!

Light fares and snacks will be provided for all attendees.

RSVP here

If you enjoy a good book, a good drink, music & dance performances, spoken word, book discussion, poetry, and just having a good time: this event is for YOU!

All the performances will follow a theme of the book: African mythology, individuality, existential crisis, found family, and becoming the best version of self.

About the Book:

NOVA feels like she has nothing to show for her almost three decades on Earth. She works a job she only tolerates. Her friends are both doing better than her in their romantic and professional lives. She has not spoken to her parents in years. When she purchases a stunning mirror at an antiques shop, her reality is turned upside down Across Both Sides of the Mirror. She finds an opportunity to get everything that she has ever wanted…but there is a cost for it. Will Nova accept what the mirror offers her, or will she choose to fight for her reality?

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Dave Hause, Tim Hause, Mark Masefield

Time
Doors 7:00pm
Showtime 8:00pm

GET YOUR TICKET HERE

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