Arwa Mahdawi and Joe Sacco in conversation at the 2025 Hay Dallas festival.
Kyle Montgomery and Hay Festival
Attendees listen as authors Cristina Rivera Garza, left, Leni Zumas, center, and Miriam Toews speak at The Wild Detective in the Bishop Arts District in Dallas, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2019. The talk was part of the Hay Forum’s second stop in Oak Cliff.
Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Books, especially fiction, remain at the heart of the annual Hay Festival Forum Dallas, launched eight years ago by Oak Cliff’s Wild Detectives. It’s still the only U.S. outpost for the series of international literary gatherings spawned by the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, named for “the town of books” — Hay-on-Wye, Wales — where it was conceived in 1987.
But as the name of the original festival suggests, Hay reaches beyond literature to include other art forms.
At this year’s ninth Hay Dallas — expanded to four days at the host’s two Bishop Arts bookshops and the nearby Texas Theatre — music is particularly prevalent. Like the novelists, nonfiction writers and journalists appearing at the festival, the musicians are coming from all over the world, including Texas.
Article continues below this ad
“One thing I think we’re getting better at is combining global conversations with very local ones,” says Javier García del Moral, one of two Spanish civil engineers who founded the Wild Detectives in 2014. “We have events with an international perspective alongside conversations about Dallas itself.”
— Port Arthur rapper Bun B for a panel with Palestinian-American songwriter and filmmaker Sama’an Ashrawi about Ashrawi’s book Baba Was a Rolling Stone chronicling his father’s time in the Palestinian rock band Al-Bara’em.
— Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo in a discussion with fellow musicians Ryan Davis, Cassandra Jenkins and Brett Eugene Ralph about the legacy of the late David Berman, founder and frontman of cult bands Silver Jews and Purple Mountains.
— Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day) talking about his recurring character Frank Bascombe.
Article continues below this ad
— Argentine writer Claudia Piñeiro, known for her bestselling crime and mystery novels that sometimes have been turned into films and TV series, exploring her body of work.
— L.A.-based Chris Kraus, author of the cult classic I Love Dick, discussing her latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together.
— Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who developed the 1619 Project recasting American history through the lens of slavery, talking about race and the stories America tells about itself.
The festival features a couple of live musical performances, starting with its opening event, “Women Creatives: Wales to the World,” a concert and discussion presented by the Welsh government as a gift to the American people on this country’s 250th anniversary.
Hay Dallas is opening a day early for this glimpse behind Welsh composer Katie Jenkins’ Symffoni’r Môr Mawr – A Transatlantic Symphony, including a live excerpt, a documentary about the symphony’s making and a discussion about the women working at the forefront of music and the performing arts in Wales and the U.S. The panel features representatives from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Opera Orchestra, Houston Grand Opera and Texas Ballet Theater.
Article continues below this ad
Meanwhile, indigenous rights advocate Yásnaya Elena A. Gil and the Ayuujk musical group Kumantukxuxpë will combine poetry and music rooted in the Ayuujk language, oral tradition and contemporary sound to argue indigenous cultures don’t belong exclusively to the past.
On the literary front, former Dallas resident Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award) returns to Hay Dallas to talk about his new political satire, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, and Mark Lamster (Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas), Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, will discuss what kind of city Dallas wants to become with activist and former Dallas City Council member Veletta Forsythe Lill.
Also in local politics, former Dallas mayors Laura Miller and Tom Leppert will debate the merits of the strong mayor form of government that some activists in the city are calling for.
At a time when new bookstores are popping up from Oak Cliff to Keller, including a second Wild Detectives down the street from the original, García del Moral points to the organic growth of Hay Dallas as a winning formula.
“When we started the festival, most of the writers actually stayed at my house. This year, we have the entire Madison Hotel booked for all the international guests,” he says. “You don’t need huge backing to start something meaningful. … Sometimes the topics are more important than the names. What matters is bringing people who really know what they’re talking about and asking questions that feel relevant to people right now.”
Article continues below this ad
A large majority of the two dozen events are free with reservations at the Hay Festival website.
Details
Hay Festival Forum Dallas runs Oct. 15-18 at Wild Detectives, 314 W. 8th St. and 321 N. Zang Blvd., and Texas Theatre, 231 W. Jefferson Blvd. Free-$10 per event. Passes $25-$65. hayfestival.com/forum/dallas/programme.