Dallas 2026

Join award-winning Welsh composer Katie Jenkins for a special concert and conversation offering an intimate glimpse behind the scenes of Symffoni’r Môr Mawr – A Transatlantic Symphony: a new musical gift from Wales to the United States celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Originally from Pontypridd and now based in New York, Katie Jenkins has created a new 15-minute orchestral work with voices that brings together the two languages and musical traditions of Wales and America. Created with leading Welsh and international artists, the work will be presented to the American people as part of the USA250 commemorations.

This special Hay Festival event will feature a live performance of Weaving Home, one of the work's movements, incorporating words by Hanan Issa, National Poet of Wales, alongside music celebrating Welsh talent and women creatives working across the globe.

The event will also include an exclusive screening of the film documenting the making of A Transatlantic Symphony, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process and the extraordinary international collaboration behind the project. Featuring artists including Sir Bryn Terfel, Ellen Williams, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Côr F1, the Pendyrus Male Choir and acclaimed American pianist Chloe Flower, the film reveals how a musical gift from Wales has been brought to life across continents.

The concert and discussion will expand the conversation beyond the symphony to celebrate the extraordinary contribution of Welsh women and Welsh creative voices internationally — from composers and conductors to dancers, singers, instrumentalists and artistic leaders.

Joining Katie Jenkins on the panel will be an inspiring group of women working at the forefront of music and the performing arts in Wales and the United States, including Shira Samuels-Shragg, Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony; Sophie Williams, Artistic Director of Pointeworks; Nicole Von Enck, Principal Dancer at Texas Ballet Theater; Scarlett Jones, Welsh soprano and Houston Grand Opera artist; and Esther Rothwell, cellist with the Dallas Opera Orchestra. The panel will be moderated by Charlotte Thomas, Deputy Head of North America for the Welsh Government.

The conversation will explore what it means to create across borders, the role of women in shaping today's cultural landscape, the power of collaboration between Wales and America, and how Welsh artists are carrying the nation's distinctive creative voice onto the world stage.

From Wales to Dallas. From Pontypridd to New York. From the Land of Song to the World.

A celebration of Welsh creativity, women shaping the arts, and the cultural connections that bring our nations together.

Images: © Crown Copyright

Southwest Review brings together Ryan Davis, Cassandra Jenkins, Brett Eugene Ralph, and Lee Ranaldo for a conversation celebrating the music, poetry, and enduring influence of David Berman. Best known as the founder and frontman of Silver Jews and later Purple Mountains, Berman created a singular body of work in which songwriting and poetry were inseparable, combining wit, melancholy, observation, and an unmistakable way of finding meaning in everyday American life.

Moderated by Jacob Rubin, the conversation will explore Berman’s work as both a musician and poet, his influence on generations of writers and songwriters, and the ways his words continue to resonate after his death. A gathering around one of the most distinctive voices in American independent music and literature.

The nonfiction works of National Book Award honorees Kelly Lytle Hernández (Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, 2022 Nonfiction Longlist; and most recently, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control) and Nilo Tabrizy (For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, 2025 Nonfiction Longlist) offer historical—and sometimes personal—contexts fueling present-day U.S. immigration policies and global movements.

Join the authors for readings and a conversation about fusing research, reporting, and identity, from the 1791 Haitian Revolution to the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Moderated by Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation.

Mark Lamster, architecture critic for The Dallas Morning News, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and author of the new book Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture, joins Stephanie Drenka and Veletta Forsythe Lill for a conversation about how Dallas is changing and what kind of city it wants to become. One of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, Dallas is a place where rapid development is transforming its neighborhoods, architecture, and public spaces.

Bringing together perspectives on architecture, preservation, community, and urban development, the panel will explore the choices that shape the character of a city: what we preserve, what we build, who participates in those decisions, and how growth affects the communities that call Dallas home. A conversation about the past, present, and future of the city, and the role its residents can play in imagining what comes next. Presented alongside Deep Vellum, the conversation will look at the past, present, and future of Dallas, and the role its residents can play in imagining what comes next.

The Hay Festival Dallas Day Pass gives you access to all ticketed and free events for the day, so you can attend any panel, talk, or performance that interests you. It’s a simple way to take in the full festival experience—good conversations, and a day spent exploring the neighborhood.

One of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary Latin American literature, Claudia Piñeiro joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas on the occasion of the English publication of Cathedrals, translated by Frances Riddle and published by Charco Press. A bestselling novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Piñeiro has built a remarkable career across literature, film, and television, with several of her novels adapted for the screen, including Elena Knows, and as co-creator and writer of the acclaimed Netflix series The Kingdom (El Reino).

Moderated by Lori Feathers, the conversation will explore Piñeiro’s wider body of work, her writing process, and her experience moving between novels, theater, film, and television, as well as the recurring questions of family, gender, religion, power, and contemporary society that run throughout her work.

The Atlantic comes to Hay Festival Forum Dallas as part of The Atlantic Across America, a national series bringing its journalism and conversations to communities across the country. The event will bring together Atlantic journalists and guests to examine some of the questions shaping American life today and how they are experienced from Dallas and Texas.

Through a conversation grounded in reporting and ideas, the event will explore the political, social, and cultural forces transforming the country, while looking beyond Washington to understand how these changes are playing out in communities across America. A chance to engage directly with the journalists and thinkers behind one of the country’s most influential publications.

Writers Liliana Colanzi, Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Yásnaya Elena A. Gil come together for a conversation around Archivo de Indias, a special project developed by Hay Festival and Anagrama, in collaboration with Charco Press, and in connection with the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. The project invited contemporary Latin American writers to explore the Archive and its extraordinary collection of documents related to the history of Spain and the Americas, using that encounter as the starting point for new writing.

Moderated by María Ramos Pacheco of The Dallas Morning News, the conversation will explore what it means for Latin American writers to return to these historical records today, what they discovered in the Archive, and how literature can question, reinterpret, and give new life to the stories preserved there. A conversation about history, colonialism, memory, and the complex relationship between Spain and the Americas seen through contemporary Latin American voices.

Philosopher Mariana Alessandri, author of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods, and writer and filmmaker Anna Pazos, author of Matar el nervio, come together for a conversation about anxiety, grief, uncertainty, and the difficult emotions we are often encouraged to overcome or leave behind. Drawing from philosophy, literature, and personal experience, their work challenges the pressure to always seek happiness and asks instead what our darker moods can reveal about ourselves and the way we live.

Moderated by Katherine Davies, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, the conversation will explore how philosophy and writing can help us understand experiences that resist easy solutions, and whether learning to live with uncertainty, sadness, and anxiety might offer a different way of thinking about what it means to live a meaningful life.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas for a conversation about history, race, education, and the stories America tells about itself. Through her journalism and The 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones has reshaped the national conversation around the legacy of slavery and its continuing influence on American society, institutions, and democracy.

Moderated by Dr. Michael J. Sorrell, President of Paul Quinn College, the conversation will explore the relationship between history and the present, the role of journalism and education in shaping public understanding, and why the way a country remembers and teaches its past matters to its future.

Award-winning writer, poet, and historian Adrian De Leon joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas with his new memoir, Notes from a Wayward Son, a deeply personal account of family, migration, and the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. Born in Manila and raised in Scarborough, Toronto, De Leon traces his family’s journey from the Philippines to Canada and his relationship with his father, a former military officer, martial arts master, and religious leader.

Moderated by Rowena Pedrena, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Production at The University of Texas at Dallas, the conversation will explore immigration, assimilation, intergenerational conflict, masculinity, and the legacies of empire that shape individual and family lives. Moving between memoir and history, De Leon brings together the personal and political to ask what we inherit from our families, what we leave behind, and what it means to find our own way home.

June Cohen, co-founder of TED Talks and one of the key figures behind transforming TED into a global media platform, joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss her new book, The Great Remembering. Drawing on years of research into communities around the world, Cohen explores what ancient and traditional ways of living can teach us about some of the challenges of contemporary life, from loneliness and disconnection to our search for meaning and belonging.

Moderated by Anne Balsamo, Arts and Humanities Distinguished University Chair and Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, the conversation will explore how practices rooted in community, ritual, connection, and shared experience might offer useful lessons for modern life, while also reflecting on Cohen’s career at the intersection of ideas, media, and storytelling, and her experience helping bring ideas to audiences around the world.

Bolivian writer Rodrigo Hasbún and Mexican novelist Brenda Navarro come together for a conversation about the ways writers transform personal experience into literature. Their fiction draws on intimate histories, family relationships, memory, displacement, and the experience of living between places, while continually questioning the boundary between a life as it was lived and the story that emerges on the page.

Moderated by John Bradley, the conversation will explore what it means to include our own lives in our books: how writers select, reshape, conceal, or reinvent personal material; what fiction makes possible that memoir may not; and how private experience can open onto larger questions of identity, belonging, loss, and change.

Writer, linguist, and Indigenous rights advocate Yásnaya Elena A. Gil joins the Ayuujk (Mixe) musical group Kumantukxuxpë for a live performance combining narrative, poetry, and music. Rooted in Ayuujk language, oral tradition, and contemporary sound, the performance challenges the idea that Indigenous cultures belong exclusively to the past and instead turns toward the futures they can imagine and create.

Through Yásnaya’s poetic voice and Kumantukxuxpë’s live music, Menp këtäkp brings together language, memory, tradition, and experimentation to explore Indigenous identity as something living and continually evolving. A performance that asks us to think about the future from a perspective grounded in ancestral knowledge while refusing to be defined by the past.

Dana A. Williams, scholar of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University, joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss her book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, correspondence, and her own conversations with Morrison, Williams reveals a less familiar side of the celebrated novelist: her groundbreaking work as an editor at Random House.

Moderated by Janelle Gray, the conversation will explore how Morrison championed Black writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali; how she worked to transform American publishing from within; and how her editorial vision formed part of the same larger cultural project as her fiction. A conversation about editing as creative and political work, the writers Morrison helped bring into print, and the enduring impact of her work on American literature.

The Hay Festival Dallas Day Pass gives you access to all ticketed and free events for the day, so you can attend any panel, talk, or performance that interests you. It’s a simple way to take in the full festival experience—good conversations, and a day spent exploring the neighborhood.

Presented by the Republic of Consciousness Prize, writer and musician Austyn Wohlers joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss her acclaimed debut novel, Hothouse Bloom, published by Hub City Press and shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize. A striking contemporary pastoral, the novel explores art, solitude, our relationship with the natural world, and the tension between the desire to withdraw from society and the realities of work, community, and economic life.

Moderated by Richard Bailey of Interabang Books, the conversation will explore Wohlers’ distinctive approach to fiction, her interest in art, nature, and consciousness, and the making of a debut that has established her as an exciting new voice in American literature. Wohlers, who is also a musician, will perform several songs during the event, bringing another dimension of her creative work into the conversation.

Writers A.J. Eversole and P.C. Verrone join Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss Back for Blood: Never Whistle at Night Part II, the second volume in the bestselling Indigenous horror anthology series, to which they both contribute. Bringing together a new collection of stories by Indigenous writers from across North America, the anthology uses horror, folklore, and the supernatural to explore identity, memory, history, resilience, and the realities of Indigenous life today.

Moderated by Gretchen VanWormer, Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, the conversation will explore the growing presence of Indigenous voices in contemporary horror, Eversole and Verrone's contributions to the colecction, and the ways writers are using the genre to confronto history, reclaim stories, and transform adversity into art.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford, one of the defining voices in contemporary American fiction, joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas for a conversation about a literary career spanning more than five decades. From The Sportswriter and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day to The Lay of the Land, Let Me Be Frank with You, and Be Mine, Ford’s work has created an enduring portrait of American life through questions of family, place, aging, loss, and change.

The conversation will look across Ford’s body of work and, in particular, at Frank Bascombe, the character he has followed through different stages of life for nearly four decades. Through Bascombe, Ford has chronicled not only the evolution of one man but also a changing America, making the series one of the most distinctive long-running projects in contemporary American fiction.

Songwriter, filmmaker, and music journalist Sama’an Ashrawi, author of Baba Was a Rolling Stone, is joined by legendary Texas rapper Bun B, acclaimed poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib, and Baba, Sama’an’s father, for a conversation about music, writing, family, mentorship, and the relationships that shape a creative life.

Taking Baba Was a Rolling Stone as a point of departure, the conversation brings together different chapters of Sama’an’s relationship with music: from growing up with the story of his father, a founding member and lead vocalist of the pioneering Palestinian rock band Al-Bara’em (The Blooms), to his longtime friendship with Bun B, who became an important mentor as Sama’an began building his career writing about music and culture. Together with Abdurraqib, they will explore how music carries memory across generations and places, how personal relationships and mutual support can help shape creative paths, and how writing about music can become a way of understanding identity, belonging, history, and the communities we build around us.

Jorge Comensal, Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, and Gabi Martínez come together for a conversation presented by LiterNatura, a project and festival dedicated to nature writing in all its forms. Through books, festivals, literary residencies, workshops, reading clubs, audiovisual work, and music, LiterNatura creates encounters between writers, artists, readers, and the natural world, strengthening the connections between literature, biodiversity, and environmental thought.

Through fiction, essays, journalism, and Indigenous thought, the three writers approach our relationship with nature from different perspectives, questioning the separation between human life and the environments we inhabit. The conversation will explore how literature can help us understand climate change, biodiversity, our relationship with land and other species, and the cultural ideas that have shaped the way we think about nature. Bringing together perspectives from Mexico and Spain, the event asks what stories we need to tell at a moment of profound environmental transformation and what literature can contribute to imagining different ways of living within the natural world.

Authors and scholars Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau join Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. Published in both English and Spanish, the book uses the extraordinary rise of Bad Bunny to explore Puerto Rico’s recent history and the ways music can become a vehicle for identity, political expression, and cultural resistance, connecting the realities of the island with a global audience.

Creators of the influential Bad Bunny Syllabus, Díaz and Rivera-Rideau will discuss Bad Bunny’s music and cultural impact while exploring larger questions around Puerto Rican identity, colonialism, migration, diaspora, and belonging. The event will be bilingual, in English and Spanish, reflecting both the book’s publication and the cultural worlds at the heart of the conversation.

Chris Kraus, author of the cult classic I Love Dick and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American literature, joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss her latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together. Moving between autofiction and true crime, the book connects a murder in Minnesota’s Iron Range with stories of family, addiction, class, and the changing social landscape of America.

The conversation will explore the real events and personal histories behind the novel, Kraus’s approach to blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, and documentary, and the questions of violence, economic decline, and the American working class at the heart of the book. It will also reflect on a career that has continually challenged conventional ideas about what fiction can be, from I Love Dick to her latest work.

Acclaimed Dallas writer Ben Fountain joins Hay Festival Forum Dallas to discuss his new novel, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, a sharp political satire that turns its attention to the spectacle, absurdities, and contradictions of contemporary American politics. Known for fiction that combines humor, political observation, and an interest in the forces shaping American life, Fountain brings that distinctive perspective to a story about power, ambition, celebrity, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between politics and entertainment.

The conversation will explore the ideas behind the new novel, Fountain’s approach to satire and political fiction, and how a writer turns the strangeness of contemporary public life into literature, while also looking back at a body of work that has consistently examined America at moments of tension and change.

Michael Zilkha, founder and publisher of ZE Books and co-founder of the influential ZE Records, joins Nina Hervé, co-director of Rough Trade Books, and poet Will Burns for a conversation about the connections between independent music and publishing. Both ZE Books and Rough Trade Books grew out of record-label cultures and carry that same independent spirit into the books they publish, bringing together literature, music, art, design, and counterculture.

The conversation will explore why record labels have moved into publishing, what books can offer musicians and artists that other formats cannot, and how the experience of discovering, developing, and presenting music can shape an editorial project. They will also discuss the relationship between books and physical objects, the importance of design and collaboration, and what independent cultural institutions can do differently from larger publishing houses.

Experience the complete Hay Festival Forum Dallas weekend with one pass.

Your Festival Pass includes:

• Access to all festival events from Friday through Sunday

Experience the complete Hay Festival Forum Dallas weekend with one pass.

Your Weekend Pass includes:

• Access to all festival events from Friday through Sunday
• Preferential entry to every event
• Guaranteed admission to sold-out events
• Festival hospitality at The Wild Detectives, with a selection of drinks available to passholders throughout the weekend