Out in West Texas, a pair of aspiring novelists and enterprising small-town newspaper owners, Barbara Brannon and Kay Ellington, were dismayed by the number of publications that were dropping book sections, cutting critics, and otherwise decimating literary coverage, especially in the Lone Star State. By the 2010s, “93 percent of the state’s newspapers offer no regular books coverage of any kind,” they told the Writers’ League of Texas.
Both newswomen worried that Texas authors in particular just weren’t getting enough attention—though plenty deserved it.
Out of that gaping hole emerged, fittingly on Groundhog’s Day 2015, a new literary venture: Lone Star Literary Life, an online newsletter aimed at Texas readers, writers, and librarians.
