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Events

The Artist and the Book | Roberto Tejada and Lisa Olstein in Conversation

Date & Time

Thu. Feb. 12, 2026 6:30 PM-7:30 PM
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Location Main Campus | Beck Building

Parking at Beck Garage
Drop off at Beck Building

Email Your Questions [email protected]

Events

The Artist and the Book | Roberto Tejada and Lisa Olstein in Conversation

Date & Time

Thu. Feb. 12, 2026 6:30 PM-7:30 PM
This event has passed

Location Main Campus | Beck Building

Parking at Beck Garage
Drop off at Beck Building
Artists have long used books as tools for education and inspiration. Increasingly, contemporary artists make books and research central to their artistic practice, mining the past in order to create new narratives. This series engages artists in conversation about the nature of books, research, and the creative process.
 
In this conversation, writers Robert Tejada and Lisa Olstein discuss their respective work, both of whom examine the meeting place of word and image. Tejada, well known to Houston audiences, addresses his latest work, Carbonate of Copper (2025), which brings together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Olstein highlights poems from her newly published work, Distinguished Office of Echoes (2025), which is a collection of collage, cutout, and erasure-based poems. Both Tejada and Olstein lean into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together.
 
The authors' books are available for purchase, and a book signing follows the discussion.
 

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About the Speakers
Roberto Tejada is the Hugh Roy and Lillian Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English-Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston. Tejada’s research and creative interests involve the language arts and image worlds of Latin America, especially Mexico, Brazil, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and other sites of U.S. Latinx cultural production. Tejada has published more than a dozen books of historical focus and his own poetry. He is also a long-standing member of the Museum’s Libraries and Archives Committee.

Lisa Olstein is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She has authored six poetry collections, as well as two non-fiction works. In addition to her published works, Olstein is the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite. Olstein’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Award.

Email Your Questions [email protected]

This program receives generous funding from Judy and Scott Nyquist.
 
Learning and Interpretation programs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, receive generous support from H-E-B; Sempra Foundation; the Brown Foundation, Inc.; the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo; the Joe Barnhart Foundation; the Cockrell Family Fund; the CFP Foundation; the Claire & Theodore Morse Foundation; the Junior League of Houston, Inc.; and additional generous donors.
 
Endowment funds are provided by the Louise Jarrett Moran Bequest; Caroline Wiess Law; Windgate Foundation; the William Randolph Hearst Foundation; Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff; the Fondren Foundation; BMC Software, Inc.; the Wallace Foundation; the Neal Myers and Ken Black Children’s Art Fund; the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation; Medha and Shashank Karve; Virginia and Ira Jackson; Jesse H. Jones II; the CFP Foundation; the Favrot Fund; gifts in memory of John Wynne; Neiman Marcus Youth Arts Education; gifts in memory of Peter Lotz; and gifts in honor of Beth Schneider.