Meet the Author: Hilal Isler

Hilal Isler is coming to the Austin Public Library Windsor Park Branch on Thursday, August 20, to talk about her debut story collection, Har Mar. She'll be in conversation with fellow Austin author Amy Gentry, so it's a writer-on-writer night rather than a solo reading.

Har Mar follows women in the early twenty-first century navigating the spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves, moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States. Isler teaches at the University of Texas; her short fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney's, New York Magazine, The Believer, The Baltimore Review, and The Paris Review online. She was a 2023 McKnight Fellow in Creative Prose and holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her conversation partner, Amy Gentry, is a familiar name in the local scene. She wrote Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits, and she also wrote a book on Tori Amos's Boys for Pele for the 33 1/3 series. Gentry holds a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago and teaches writing here in Austin, so she's well-positioned to dig into the craft side of things.

The Windsor Park Branch is at 5833 Westminster Drive, and the event runs from 6:00 to 7:30 PM. It's free, and if you're not already familiar with the branch, Paul Bond's bronze sculpture Reading Between the Lions stands inside.