THE STARS AT NIGHT

 

Leading Lights: $275 – One VIP admission to our 2025 Stars at Night Celebration, including VIP pre-party, limited edition tote, books, and other swag!
6-7 p.m.

 

PLEASE NOTE: While ticket-buyers will receive a receipt for their purchase via email, there is no physical ticket for this event. We ask that guests check in at our will-call table upon arrival, where we’ll confirm your ticket(s).

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THE STARS AT NIGHT 2025 HONOREES

 

LITERARY STAR: JOY WILLIAMS

Joy Williams is the author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and most recently Harrow, five collections of stories, including Concerning the Future of Souls and Ninety-Nine Stories of God, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Hadada Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 2008. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.

FIRST STAR: EMILY HUNT KIVEL

Emily Hunt Kivel’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, American Short Fiction, and New England Review, among other publications. She completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow and where she taught under a U.W.P. teaching fellowship. She is from California but now lives in Texas. Dwelling is her first novel.

 

CONSTELLATION STAR: CARRIE R. MOORE

Carrie R. Moore’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and other publications. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Community of Writers, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. She earned her MFA in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Keene Prize for Literature and was the inaugural fellow at the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat in Sag Harbor, New York. Her debut collection of stories, Make Your Way Home, is forthcoming from Tin House Books.

COMMUNITY STAR: LEILA GREEN LITTLE

Leila Green Little is a rural mom and intellectual freedom advocate. She has been fighting against censorship in her local public library system since 2021. In 2022, she and six others sued their county (Leila Green Little, et. al, v. Llano County, et. al) for banning books. This case has so far resulted in a federal court issuing a preliminary injunction requiring Llano County to return the censored books to the catalog and shelves of the public library. The case is ongoing and she awaits a ruling from the en banc panel in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case was last heard in September 2024. Leila was galvanized to learn more about librarianship, and earned her Master of Library Science degree from the University of North Texas in 2024. Previously, Ms. Little earned her master’s degree from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and had a previous career as a speech-language pathologist specializing in working with patients with head and neck cancer. She likes to read banned books, and lives on a cattle ranch with her husband of 19 years and their kids.