august, 2026
Event Details
Mary Helen Specht and Deb Olin Unferth come together for a conversation around their new novels, Mudlark and Earth 7.
About Mudlark
A dazzling dystopian novel about the fall of a troubled rockstar, her long-lost solo album, and her daughter’s epic search for redemption in the ruins of New York City.
Set between the chaos of a final performance at Burning Man and the flooded ruins of a future Manhattan, Mudlark follows a mother and daughter separated by disaster, memory, and time. As Neko searches for traces of her missing mother through a fractured New York shaped by scarcity and survival, the novel moves through questions of art, inheritance, and what remains after collapse. Blending literary fiction, speculative fiction, and music culture, Mudlark traces the persistence of human connection in a damaged world.
About Earth 7
An end-of-the-world love story, an epic full of pathos and humor, asking what can be saved of our planet
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
Mary Helen Specht is the author of Mudlark and Migratory Animals, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and other publications. A Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, she teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Barn 8 and Earth 7, and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and The New York Times Magazine. She teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and directs the Pen City Writers program in south Texas.
