METRO EVENT | Rag Blog ‘Highbrow Happy Hour’ features literary hotshots Barrios & Zigal

AUSTIN — The Rag Blog is having a party and everyone’s invited! Our special guests will be acclaimed writers Gregg Barrios and Thomas Zigal who will sign books and do short readings from their work. (We’ll also hang, hobnob, and consume adult beverages.)

The event will take place from 5-8 p.m., Friday, April 25, at South Austin Mexican restaurant and venue, El Mercado (“World Peace through Tex-Mex”), 1302 S. 1st St. El Mercado’s food and full bar will be available on a cash basis. Admission is free, though donations to the New Journalism Project will be welcome and Rag Blog t-shirts with original Jim Franklin art will be available.

Gregg Barrios is a San Antonio playwright, poet, filmmaker, journalist, and critic. He is a 2013 USC Annenberg Getty Fellow, and serves on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. A gay Chicano activist since the ‘60s, Gregg wrote for The Rag from its earliest days.

Acclaimed Austin novelist Thomas Zigal just won the state’s most prestigious literary award — the Jesse Jones Award for Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters — for his post-Katrina novel, Many Rivers to Cross. Zigal was “an anti-war hippie and an avid reader of The Rag” in ’70s Austin.

Gregg Barrios will be Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 25, from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed here. Tom Zigal was our guest on Rag Radio in October 2013 and you can listen to the podcast here.

The Rag Blog and Rag Radio are projects of the New Journalism Project, a 501(c)(3) Texas nonprofit. For more information contact editor@theragblog.com.