I Know About A Thousand Things: A Reading By Naomi Shihab Nye & Marion Winik

Join Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik for a reading of selections from I Know About A Thousand Things: The Writing of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas, a collection of excerpts from Ann’s letters and other occasional writing, which they co-edited.

The reading will be held at 7pm at Grace United Methodist Church. Attendance is free, but an RSVP is required.

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About the book

Struggling for 30 years with chronic illness at her ranch outside Uvalde, Texas, Ann Alejandro was a writer of transporting natural talent and prolificity. Though she would have loved to be widely read and appreciated, she was too modest to scale the walls of the publishing world. Thus her chosen form was the letter and her audience close friends and family, including the poet Naomi Nye and the essayist Marion Winik. For decades, her often lengthy missives continued to delight her correspondents, blending observation, storytelling, humor, praise, and accounts of her deep attachment to the land and animals that surrounded her in the rural Southwest.

Before Ann’s death in 2019 at the age of 64, Naomi and Marion promised her they would pull together a book from thousands of pages left in their care. They selected the very best of Ann Alejandro, added commentary, and organized the material into chapters with titles like Faith, Motherhood, Land, Snakes, Pain, and Love.

I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas is an extraordinary collection of writing put together by two longtime literary friends in tribute to a third. It includes an introduction by Nye and and an afterword by Winik, as well as a photo gallery of Ann’s life. It will delight and enrich readers for years to come.

About the editors

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is the Texas Writer of the Year for 2024-2025. She has served as Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States and poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine and the Texas Observer. She has written or edited more than thirty books, most recently Grace Notes: Poems about Family and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. She has worked as a visiting writer all her life. She received Lifetime Achievement awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the National Books Critics Circle, and the Arab American National Museum.

MARION WINIK is the author of The Big Book of the Dead, First Comes Love, and other books. Her essays have been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Agni, and elsewhere; her column at BaltimoreFishbowl.com has been running since 2011. A professor in the MFO program at the University of Baltimore, she reviews books for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Oprah Daily, and People, among others, and hosts the NPR podcast The Weekly Reader. She was a commentator on All Things Considered for fifteen years.