New Texas writers in print

Every other page on this site is a frozen record of what New Texas published between 2018 and 2020. This page is the exception: an editorial that looks forward from the archive to the books the journal's contributors have published since, and the recognition they received. The facts were checked against publishers' pages, the Texas Institute of Letters, review outlets and the authors' own sites. Where something could not be confirmed, the page says so.

Last reviewed in October 2026. If an author named here publishes something new, or a detail proves wrong, this page is corrected. The piece pages are not.

Rudy Ruiz is the contributor whose career has moved furthest since the journal went quiet. Born in Brownsville and educated at Harvard, he had two stories in New Texas, Ports of Entry (June 2019) and The Limes (September 2019, filed under the 2020 issue), both from a border bildungsroman in progress. The Limes was a 2020 finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters' Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story.

His novels all come from Blackstone Publishing. The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez (2020) made Booklist's top ten first novels of the year, took two gold medals at the 2021 International Latino Book Awards and was a Spur Award finalist. Valley of Shadows (2022), a historical novel with a ghost story and a mystery folded into it, set in a West Texas border town in the 1880s, won the Institute's Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction in 2023. Publishers Weekly found its romance conventional but its portrait of frontier cruelty stark and its magic-realist touches haunting.

The Border Between Us followed on 27 August 2024: a boy on the Brownsville border in the late 1970s who wants to be an artist, a father with a tire business and a sideline on the river. Kirkus praised its attention to daily life at the crossing and the humanity of the migrants it portrays. In 2025 the Philosophical Society of Texas gave it the Kempner Family Book Prize for Fiction, and the author's site lists it as a 2025 International Latino Book Awards gold medalist. A paperback appeared in September 2025.

Kirkus on The Border Between Us: "told with precision and authenticity."

In March 2024 the Texas Institute of Letters elected Ruiz as one of twelve new members, alongside Cecilia Balli and Lucinda Williams; the same year he was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He lives in San Antonio, where he co-founded the agency Interlex in 1995. A fourth novel, Diablo Creek, has been reported for Blackstone in 2027 (Publishers Marketplace, as cited by Wikipedia); treat it as provisional until the publisher lists it.

Clay Reynolds, whose story Autumn Moon ran in the 2018 issue, was the most established writer the journal published, and the one contributor whose record has closed. Born in Quanah, Texas, in 1949, he spent two decades at the University of Texas at Dallas as professor and director of creative writing, retiring in 2019. He died at home near McKinney on 14 April 2022, of pancreatic cancer, at 72.

The year his New Texas story appeared, he took two Texas Institute of Letters prizes: the Kay Cattarulla Award for best short fiction and the Edwin Bud Shrake Award for best short nonfiction, both 2018. His books include the novels The Vigil, Franklin's Crossing, Monuments, The Tentmaker and Vox Populi and the story collection Sandhill County Lines. His official site lists no posthumous publications and we have found none; his obituary ran in the Dallas Morning News, with a tribute in Lone Star Literary Life.

David Kaczynski's story La Linda, in the 2020 issue, is set in the far south of Brewster County, where he bought land in 1984. His one full-length book preceded the journal: Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family, published by Duke University Press in February 2016, with an afterword by the forensic psychiatrist James L. Knoll IV. It recounts his family's history and the decision he and his wife made to go to the FBI about his brother Ted. He is also the author of a poetry chapbook, A Dream Named You.

His public work has been activism rather than publishing: executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty from 2001 to 2012, then of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Woodstock, New York. He appeared in the 2020 Netflix documentary Unabomber: In His Own Words. His brother died in federal prison in June 2023, having refused contact for decades. No new book has followed Every Last Tie; La Linda remains one of the few pieces of his fiction in print anywhere.

Phillip Parotti, whose comic critical essay A Question of Precision appeared in 2019 (the journal spelled his first name Philip), has had the busiest late career of anyone here. Born in Silver City, New Mexico, in 1941, an Annapolis graduate and former naval officer, he taught literature at Sam Houston State University from 1972 to 2004. His Trojan War novels of 1986 to 1990 made his early reputation. Then, after a long gap, came a run of Second World War naval novels from Casemate Publishers: Splinter on the Tide and A Cast of Falcons (2021), In the Shadows of Guadalcanal (2022), winner of the Arizona-New Mexico Book Award for historical fiction, and Riders Upon the Storm and Through Bitter Seas (2023), the last about a Navy rescue tug off Sicily and Anzio, released as an audiobook in November 2024. A February 2023 profile from his home town reported a sixth book in progress.

• Ruth A. Rouff's Lone Star was an excerpt from a novel about the athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias. The journal's note described her as the author of two young-adult novels from Townsend Press and of Pagan Heaven (Bedazzled Ink, 2016). Since then her short fiction has appeared in Mystery Tribune, which describes her as a freelance educational writer in southern New Jersey. We cannot confirm that the Babe Didrikson novel has been published in full.
• William Matthew McCarter, author of the 2020 essay The Persistence of Memory, is a tenured professor of literature at Southwestern Illinois College with a PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington. His scholarly book remains Homo Redneckus: On Being Not Qwhite in America (2012). His contributor biography at Front Porch Republic says his Ozarks fiction has appeared in Reckon Review and Bending Genres, and that a first novel, Cornbread Voodoo and Crawdaddy Gumbo, is forthcoming from All Things That Matter Press. We have not found it in a catalog and list it as announced, not published.

New Texas was published by the Department of Languages and Literature at Sul Ross State University, which still exists under that name and offers a Bachelor of Arts in English in Alpine. The university reported 1,942 students in the fall of 2024. We have found no issue of New Texas dated after 2020, apart from a few pieces tagged 2021, and no announcement of a relaunch. The journal's domain lapsed, which is why this archive exists.

Writing has not stopped on campus. In April 2021 the university appointed Sidney Balman Jr., a former war correspondent and novelist, as writer in residence, teaching creative writing and advising the student newspaper, The Skyline, and the student literary journal, The Sage, which has appeared for more than half a century. We have not confirmed whether that appointment continues in 2026.

The archive records what was published. This page records what came next.