2025 Events

Thursday, February 13th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
Who Owns the Moon
Cynthia Levinson
A former educator, Cynthia Levinson writes and speaks on nonfiction for young readers, focusing on social justice. One of her
previous books described an Arab-Jewish
children’s circus in Israel. Her books have received recognition and awards from the NAACP, the American Library
Association, National Council of Teachers of English, and other organizations. She lives in Austin, Texas, and Boston, Massachusetts.

Wednesday, March 13th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
We Burn Daylight
Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of the novels We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This, and the multi-award-winning collection Corpus Christi: Stories. He also edited Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer and wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning, which was released in theaters around the world by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Among his many honors are a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Glasgow Prize, and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, “the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story.” His work has been widely translated and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

Wednesday, April 16th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
The Sinners All Bow
Kate Winkler Dawson
In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian, acclaimed journalist, and podcaster, Winkler Dawson travels back in time to nineteenth-century small-town America, emboldened to finish the work Williams started nearly two centuries before. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the gaps of Williams’s research to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present, anchored by three women who subverted the script they were given.

Wednesday, May 7th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
Not Our Daughter
Chad Zunker
Chad Zunker is a bestselling author known for his gripping thrillers, including the Sam Callahan series and An Equal Justice. A Texas native, Zunker has a background in journalism and law, which informs his fast-paced legal and crime fiction. His latest novel, Not Our Daughter, is a heart-wrenching psychological thriller about a mother’s desperate fight to protect her child after a devastating accusation threatens to tear their family apart. With his signature blend of suspense and emotional depth, Zunker continues to captivate readers with compelling narratives that explore justice, family, and resilience.

Thursday, September 11th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
Sorrowful Mysteries
Stephen Harrigan
Sorrowful Mysteries is a detailed and extraordinarily compassionate examination of the phenomenon of Our Lady of Fatima, an attempt to unravel and put into perspective the lives of the three children, how this life-altering event changed them and the world they knew, and how it intersected with so many of the signal moments of the twentieth century—pandemics, revolutions, world wars, assassinations, and even skyjackings. It is a sweeping story, but also at its heart a very personal one, about Harrigan’s own relationship with Catholicism and his lifelong struggle to break free from a religion that in so many paradoxical ways shaped and defined him.

Wednesday, October 15th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
The Slip
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind....Read more
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Wednesday, November 12th, 2025
Happy Hour: 6:00pm
Program: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Chez Zee American Bistro
The Gift of the Red Bird
When Paula D'Arcy lost her husband and baby in a car crash, she began an inner search for a faith that was stronger than fear. She tells her story of spiritual exhaustion, her journey alone into the wilderness for three days, and the renewal she was blessed to experience. Now with reflection guide for reading groups.
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Tickets Available Soon!