Former Tarrant County GOP Chairman Bo French is running what can fairly be called a fossil fascist campaign in his bid to unseat incumbent Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright in the May 26 runoffs. A victory for French would secure him the GOP nomination for a six-year term atop the agency that oversees, and is generally captured by, the state’s all-too-precious oil and gas industry.

Wright and French essentially tied at 32 percent in a five-way March primary, with French running strongest in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. In Texas, incumbents forced into runoffs rarely survive.

The 56-year-old French spends much of his time commenting on things that seem far afield from oil and gas regulation. A silver-spoon scion of a Texas oil family, the well-coiffed French has called on X for the deportation of a Chinese-American state representative and a Muslim state representative—and indeed the denaturalization and deportation of all Muslims in America based on religious faith.

French has also repeatedly affirmed his belief in the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that there’s a concerted effort by Democrats, Jews, or some other secretive “cabal” of evildoers to crowd out white people through mass immigration. “The Great Replacement is real,” he posted in November.

The idea as we know it today has its roots in French novelist Jean Raspail’s 1973 The Camp of the Saints, which depicted immigrants laying dystopian waste to the West. The novel’s racial paranoia animated the white nationalists who built the modern anti-immigration movement. The novel also inspired another French author, Renaud Camus, who pushed the idea closer to the mainstream some 15 years ago.

But “replacement”-style fears of white “extinction” stretch back much further: They spurred American eugenicists to introduce racist immigration quotas in the United States in 1924, as well as motivating völkisch ideologues to devise a political program to protect Germany’s “Aryan racial peasant core” that would ultimately fuel the Nazis’ imperial expansion and mass extermination project.

A hundred years later, French’s rhetoric has reappropriated the same fascist blood-and-soil rhetoric, pushing beyond the bounds even of Texas’ already far-right statewide Republican leaders. In October, French discussed “the ‘replacement’ of Europe’s sons & daughters in their blood-won lands,” writing that “We’re exiles in our own nations.” As a solution, he calls for the removal of all “third world savages,” including some Native Americans—“who we conquered, then bizarrely let have a nation inside our nation.”

Echoing fascists who’ve come before, French’s MAGA culture war seeks to “reclaim the natural order.” The order that he seeks, though, is decidedly anti-nature. Concerning the actual job of the Railroad Commission (RRC), French proposes to further deregulate an industry that already runs roughshod over the state’s ecologically interdependent web of life: He refers to modest oilfield waste rules spearheaded by Wright as “Green New Deal environmental regulations” that must be abolished.

In other words, French is running a blood-and-oil campaign that displaces blame for environmental and resource crises onto the far right’s favorite scapegoats: immigrants and Muslims.

Take his approach to the unfolding water crisis in Corpus Christi, for instance: French has run a major campaign ad laying the blame at the feet of the plastics company SABIC—not for its role as a major industrial petrochemical manufacturer and water user, but for the fact that it’s owned by Muslims (i.e. Saudi Aramco). In reality, the city’s water crisis is the result of a fossil-fuel driven feedback loop: Fossil extraction continues to drive planetary temperatures higher, propelling a drought that, in combination with operation of several major petrochemical outfits in the area, is sapping the city dry.

This type of deflection is likely to proliferate as the climate crisis accelerates in tandem with the rising racial resentment on display in French’s campaign. (This is all something I’ve spent the last several years researching for my forthcoming book, Blood, Soil, and Oil: Far Right Acceleration in the Age of Climate Crisis.) 

Behind French are some familiar characters in Texas far-right politics: the same notorious archconservative oil magnates, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, whose money has been deployed against incumbent Republicans for more than a decade now. The Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice, a PAC funded by Dunn and historically by Wilks, provided French with $375,000, more than half his campaign war chest in the run-up to the March 3 primary. (The PAC refunded $1 million to Wilks last summer, before it started giving to French’s RRC campaign, but Wilks did chip in a small personal contribution to French in February.)

These West Texas oilmen’s political giving fits the oil industry’s long history of funding and fueling fascist regimes. The Koch brothers’ father literally built a pivotal oil refinery for the Nazis. Spanish General Francisco Franco’s fascist revolt wouldn’t have been possible without Texaco. And BP fueled South Africa’s apartheid military (a system of rule that French openly defends).

In fact, French himself is an oil industry nepo baby: His father, Bob French, hoovered up over $100 million in Texas oil money as part of a generation of independent wildcatters that the RRC leveled the playing field for in the post-war years. According to one obituary, Bob was eventually “inducted into the All-American Wildcatters in 1982.” Bo French’s grandfather, Lloyd Robert French, also cofounded the Permian Basin Oil Show in 1940 and served as its first president from 1950 to 1952. Now known as the Permian Basin International Oil Show, the massive expo brings hundreds of oil and gas industry exhibitors to the Midland-Odessa area every year.

Wright, meanwhile, who secured his position through his own upset of an RRC incumbent in 2020, is backed by a broader swath of the oil and gas industry. ConocoPhillips, Valero Energy, Chevron, and Exxon have collectively funneled him at least $50,000 over this election cycle. Energy Transfer Partner’s Kelcy Warren (of Standing Rock and Dakota Access Pipeline infamy) has put up $10,000. In the typical railroad commissioner mold, Wright owns several gas patch waste companies and is invested in some of the very drillers he’s supposed to regulate.

Although French is backed by the insurgent wing of the party, including Senate candidate and Attorney General Ken Paxton, conservative stalwart and fellow Dunn beneficiary Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has endorsed Wright. Last summer, Patrick called for French’s resignation as Tarrant County GOP chair after French tweeted a poll asking his followers whether Jews or Muslims were the bigger “threat” to the nation. Governor Greg Abbott is backing Wright as well.

French’s fascism has nevertheless managed to push Wright to the, well, right. “Like every Texan, I am deeply concerned about the alarming Islamification of Texas. I fully expect the Texas Legislature to make this issue a priority in the upcoming session,” Wright posted on May 5. “But the Texas Railroad Commission, the agency charged with regulating the oil and gas industry,” he clarified, “has no authority to make any policy that would affect this issue.”

Neither French nor Wright responded to requests for comment for this article.

In an interesting global twist, French has made Islamophobia the heart of his campaign at a time when the very industry he’s seeking to oversee is reaping massive profits from the Trump administration’s war on Iran—and costing average Texans more at the pump as a result. Unlike some on the fringe right, French has stood with Trump on Iran. If history’s a guide, French’s cheerleading of hostilities abroad, paired with a hands-off regulatory approach, could portend economic disaster—and maybe a political shift down the road.

In his 1981 book, Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission, University of Texas Emeritus Professor of Government David Prindle outlines how the RRC’s decision to allow the maximum rate of domestic extraction (crashing prices) handed embargo power to the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries, which rapidly curtailed extraction rates elsewhere. Then, the RRC’s failure to handle a Central Texas gas shortage amid the 1973 oil embargo crisis set up a pro-regulation and pro-consumer RRC candidate for victory during the 1976 election. Today’s global energy shock sets up a new opportunity for a historical echo, Prindle told the Observer.

Prindle also said he takes French’s Islamophobic attacks personally, since his wife is Turkish and culturally Muslim. French’s strategy, Prindle says, isn’t exactly new. “The original Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s was anti-Black, but the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was at least as much anti-immigrant as it was anti-Black,” he said. “So the idea that white and incidentally, Christians, are under attack is by no means something [new].”

In a more immediate sense, the difference between a French term on the RRC and a second Wright term for day-to-day oil operations might be subtle. Since 2021, Wright has taken fairly standard positions on the agency’s biggest issues, paying bare-minimum lip service to issues of flaring, plugging abandoned wells, and injection blowouts and seismicity.

Drawing French’s ire, Wright did spearhead an effort to update the commission’s oilfield waste rules to require drillers to register their rainbow-hued toxic tailing ponds. The rules touched a nerve among the likes of Tim Dunn when the draft was released in 2024. His son’s oil and gas company later sued the RRC over the regulation.

Jim Wright (Courtesy/campaign)

Still, the difference between Wright and French on issues like flaring and waste pits isn’t much more than rhetorical window dressing, argued Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift Action, which promotes pro-regulatory reform at the RRC. While French has taken aim at the RRC’s wastefield rules as overly burdensome, Palacios said they ultimately amount to an ineffective patchwork with different requirements for different drillers.

“For Bo French to come in and talk about deregulating this industry … it really raises a lot of questions,” Palacios told the Observer. “What does he even want? Why even go through the process of deregulating when the rules are so weak, and they’re already not being enforced, and they don’t mean anything?” 

Moreover, French has vowed to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the RRC—something that has already been effectively dismantled at state agencies after Abbott’s 2025 executive order banning such policies. While French has likewise made hay of the RRC’s Historically Underutilized Businesses program, the Texas Comptroller already restructured the program last year to the exclusive benefit of veterans. Nevertheless, Palacios argues his hostility toward DEI could hurt RRC recruitment and retention.

In any case, whoever emerges from this month’s GOP runoff will face Houston-area petroleum engineer and Democratic state Representative Jon Rosenthal in the November midterms. Rosenthal’s campaign has centered on the need for tighter weatherization standards for the industry after power losses during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri. He has also promised to more meaningfully restrain flaring and waste pits, bring down gas prices through better oversight, and protect the state’s dwindling water supply from oil contamination and leaks.

Another issue Rosenthal told the Observer he generally supports is re-empowering local municipalities. In 2014, the state legislature stripped municipalities of local regulatory control over oil and gas drilling sites following a novel fracking ban passed in Denton, and handed that power to the RRC. Rosenthal said he supports returning local control to cities and counties, an issue with implications for communities engaged in fights against artificial intelligence-related data centers and accompanying gas plants.

Stripping local authority, Rosenthal said, was an egregious overstep. “It was before I got in, but even during my time, this legislature has routinely preempted local control in all sorts of areas,” he said. “Local control used to be a cornerstone of Republican political ideology. I don’t know what happened.”

The post Bo French’s Blood-and-Oil Bid for Railroad Commissioner appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In their book released this January, Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports, authors Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth offer a distressing encapsulation of the extent to which recent laws and policies have severely limited and even denied transgender athletes access to sports. “When we started this project in 2023, we interviewed twenty transgender people … about their experiences playing sports across a range of ages and playing levels. At that time all twenty of those athletes were able to play and compete,” they write. Three years later, “Only five of our interviewees are still legally able to participate in sports. Every athlete in our study under the age of thirty-two has been banned from participating.”

The swiftness and scope of these bans is breathtaking. While the legal and organizational moves to push trans athletes out of sports are only one part of a larger project to curtail trans people’s ability to live their lives as they want and need, or even to eradicate them from public life altogether, sports play an important role because so many Americans need little evidence or convincing to believe that trans athletes do not belong. 

Because sports have a built-in gender binary at the center of their organizational structure, gender-expansive athletes—trans, intersex, and nonbinary—who challenge that setup are immediately seen as a threat. Further, the binary sports structure is also a hierarchy: Men have historically been and continue to be better resourced, receiving more TV time and media coverage, higher salaries, and scientific research, while getting hired into coaching and leadership positions more than their women counterparts. This is a manufactured scarcity for women in sports that has misogyny at its root, but it is one nonetheless. So when gender-expansive athletes push on the binary, an easy way to dismiss them is to suggest they are taking from the little that women have. No evidence needed. And once the majority has decided a marginalized group is the demon in one part of a story, it’s easier to paint them as demons in another. 

To counter this, we need to look at the topic of gender-expansive athletes in a detailed and holistic way that takes the humanity and lives of those athletes seriously. Luckily, over the past three years, three books have been published that do just this.

(Illustration by Texas Observer staff)

The first was 2023’s Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes. A journalist at ESPN, Barnes has been covering gender-expansive athletes since 2018, which means they (Barnes’ pronouns are they/them) have been covering this topic longer and more comprehensively than almost anyone else. It’s not surprising then that Fair Play is a good, well-written on-ramp. 

Before diving into trans athletes specifically, Barnes first addresses the misogyny at the heart of most sporting structures, which led to women being excluded from sporting spaces historically and then, once included, left them dealing with assumptions about their sexual identities (i.e., the idea that women who play sports are lesbians). Then Barnes introduces Caster Semenya, a Black South African middle-distance phenom who was born and raised as a girl. But, as she succeeded, Semenya’s gender was questioned. World Athletics, which oversees track and field, found that Semenya had “high levels of natural, or endogenous, testosterone,” Barnes writes, and the organization wanted her to suppress it to a level that would force her into the women’s category as defined by the oversight body. 

This came even as, Barnes writes, “The science of the advantage of testosterone is not as straightforward as we would assume it to be.” While there is plenty of science about testosterone’s effects on bodies, there’s not much data on how that translates to athletic performance specifically. Though important, testosterone is but one part of the cocktail that determines what makes someone good at a particular sport. “A person’s testosterone level,” Barnes writes, “does not determine athletic outcomes.”

Barnes tells the stories of a few high-profile trans athletes (there are only so many). Since Barnes was reporting on these athletes while they were competing, they are able to paint rich scenes for the reader, then contextualize those within the larger landscape. Mack Beggs, a trans boy wrestler in Texas, was forced to wrestle against, and ultimately defeat, girls because of a state rule (then law) that says schoolchildren must compete in the category to which they were assigned at birth. Beggs’ was a big story, certainly, but it was Andraya Yearwood, a Black trans girl runner in Connecticut, who became a major flashpoint in the national conversation after she achieved some success. “Yearwood has been pointed to in bill after bill after bill” across the country, Barnes writes, “as the reason why restricting access to sports for transgender kids is necessary.” 

Then came Lia Thomas, the Ivy League swimmer who won a race at an NCAA event in early 2022, a story Barnes covered as it unfolded. The coverage of Thomas was “constant and increasingly aggressive in tone,” they write, and it coincided with “more legislative measures restricting the participation of transgender athletes.” Thomas, who followed the NCAA policy exactly, also showed how, for many people, policies are good enough only until a trans athlete wins: “The fact that Thomas was able to swim and to win races in the women’s category meant the policy was broken.” 

Barnes, in attempting to answer the question of what they do think is fair, lays out big-picture but nuanced prescriptions. “My bright line concerns transgender youth. … I cannot accept a system that would allow for transgender youth to be affirmed in the classroom but be othered on a sports team.” They believe recreational and intramural sports should be without limitations; for high school and college, they’re willing to consider some restrictions.

At the elite level, it gets more complicated for Barnes, who writes that there are always more “strict rules and regulations” for those athletes, “so it would make sense to me that a similar level of scrutiny be applied to questions of eligibility in gendered categories.” They could also see different considerations if an athlete is on a team or competing as an individual. Still, at all levels, they want “a path to participation” for gender-expansive athletes. 

Overall, Barnes is adamant that while attempting to make sports fair is a worthy idea, “The reality of sports is that we accept unfairness all the time.” In the end, what Barnes wants is “a more gender-inclusive sporting culture at young ages” because it “is better for all kids of all genders.”

Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes, a 2025 addition to this discourse by Harrison Browne, a transgender athlete who played professional hockey, and his sister and investigative journalist Rachel Browne, covers similar ground to Fair Play. But Harrison brings a specific point of view to the topic. He played first on the women’s team at the University of Maine, then in the National Women’s Hockey League. 

“By 2016, when I was playing professionally in Buffalo,” he writes in the introduction for Let Us Play, “I didn’t want to hide anymore and decided to come out publicly as a trans man.” He later retired from hockey before beginning hormone treatments and entering “the world of storytelling through acting and writing” (side note: You can see him as a hockey player in the blockbuster show Heated Rivalry).

Let Us Play focuses on the stories of gender-expansive athletes and the arguments against inclusive policies. The authors consider the current moment to be a moral panic. According to the Brownes, such panics target “misunderstood, marginalized, and vulnerable people in the name of safety, purity, and, of course, morality.” They estimate that trans kids are “a mere .44 percent of high school athletes,” yet “Bans against trans women and girls in sports have now become one of the most successful anti-LGBTQ+ policies being pursued in the US.” 

These bans are “an entry point to attacking the rights of all LGBTQ+ people and must be viewed as part of the larger political project of the right,” they write. 

The authors argue that understanding trans athletes is necessary to broaden “inclusion and acceptance within sports and beyond,” and this includes questioning of “gender segregation and traditional heteronormative roles across all sports.” They see discussions of “fairness” as placing a spotlight on gender-expansive athletes to “divert attention away from the haves and have-nots in the athletic community, regardless of gender identity” because “It’s a lot easier to target someone’s gender identity than it is to discuss more complex issues regarding privilege and oppression.” 

The Brownes are concerned, instead, about inequality between men’s and women’s sports and the amount of “abuse, especially sexual abuse, faced by women athletes” around the world. Additionally, debates about trans inclusion often ignore how “enforcement of these policies inevitably leads to more surveillance of women’s bodies, both cisgender and trans.”

Like Barnes, the Brownes interrogate the role of testosterone and other sex hormones in the discussion around trans athletes. They write that there is even some research that suggests that “trans women are at a disadvantage in relation to cisgender women in some categories of athletic ability.” One study, which they describe as both “groundbreaking” and “contentious,” found that while trans women had “better handgrip strength, they also had lower cardiovascular fitness and jumping abilities compared to the cisgender women.” They fear, though, that the lack of research that already exists on trans athletes will be made worse by restrictive policies: “In the eventuality of trans athletes, an already minuscule population, decreasing in number, so too will the number of potential study participants.” 

Let Us Play dedicates a section of the book to trans youth and how important it is to allow them access to sports. The authors note that “trans-inclusive sports programs for youth improve the participation rates of cisgender youth, especially girls.” That’s because a welcoming environment makes everyone feel more comfortable. Let Us Play proposes more mixed-gender sports and teams and an “inclusion-first mentality,” as opposed to “a scarcity mentality.”

Roscher and Baeth found themselves in the unenviable position of publishing Fair Game after both Fair Play and Let Us Play were out, but there can hardly be too many books that push back on the transphobic misinformation surrounding this topic. 

Roscher is a writer, educator, and former athlete. Baeth is a critical feminist scholar, a “cultural studies practitioner of sport,” and the director of research at Athlete Ally, an organization that supports LGBTQ+ athletes. 

Roscher and Baeth are interested in showing how “The ongoing marginalization of trans athletes isolates young athletes, including cisgender girls and cisgender boys, from experiencing healthy sports climates.” They’re also very critical of the current sports landscape. Investing so much time and energy trying to keep gender-expansive athletes out of sports, and specifically trans girls and women out of women’s sports, they argue, is part of a larger misogynistic project. In this setup, “Women’s sports [remain] a patriarchal tool.”

Fair Game also discusses how the science around human bodies is more complicated than the stories we tell about them. “Human physiology is complex, and sex, according to scientists, doctors, and researchers, is better thought of as a series of spectrums, a constellation, or a mosaic.” If we are going to spend so much time focusing on “assumed physical advantage for trans athletes,” they write, “We also need to look at the fact that there are arguably mental, emotional, physical, and psychological advantages to being cis that affect athletic performance.” In a transphobic world, “There is an ease to being cis that is hard to evaluate but could arguably be a competitive advantage, and it is an ease that cis folks often take for granted.” Roscher and Baeth want a fuller, truer picture of what counts as an advantage in sport.

The way that Roscher and Baeth weave in the stories of the 20 trans athletes they interviewed for Fair Game is their most novel contribution. There is Dew, a trans boy who lives in the South and powerlifts. Su is a trans woman ultrarunner, and Al is a boy who loves to swim. Starlet is a woman who golfs, and Avery plays hockey. They tell each of their stories, injecting statistics we’ve seen before alongside everyday trans sporting experiences. And the authors focus on the joy, comfort, and ease that these trans athletes find in doing sports, a gift in a society that often belittles trans experience. Lennox, a trans athlete who competed in Division I soccer, says, “Playing soccer was the only place where my body felt accepted.” In perhaps the best lines of Fair Game, Addison, a trans woman powerlifter, recounts, “This body can do incredible things. This culture is the problem. My body is limitless.” 

All three of these books are heavy reads. They document harm. They explain how misinformation is being weaponized against a marginalized group, many of whom are children, and they suggest that things will get worse before they get better. The most affirming part of each book is hearing from and about the many gender-expansive athletes who love sports, are trying to make space within current sporting spaces, and are dreaming of better sporting communities in the future. There is such deep humanity in all of this. 

(Texas Observer staff)

In black ink on white pages, these three books lay out in detail the world we have currently built and the harm it is doing. But a fourth work on the subject shows, in comparatively bursting color, what a better sporting world can look like. 

Come Out and Play: The Queer Sports Project, an edited comics anthology by Meghan Kemp-Gee and Megan Praz, assembles contributions—“fiction, nonfiction, and the weird gray area in-between”—from five continents. Andy Casadonte’s “Like a Lonely Soul on Fire” opens the collection with a story about how one boy’s crush on another got him into running, and how he still thinks of him whenever he goes out for a run years later. Mac Crane writes and Praz illustrates “Run It Back,” about rival women basketballers and ex-girlfriends who are playing against each other in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Dave Davenport’s contribution is about a two-week trip camping, hiking, and riding mountain bikes alongside his then-partner. Other tales touch on the gay rodeo circuit of the 1990s, roller derby, and more.

All together, these books press us to question what we take for granted and to open our hearts and minds to new possibilities. This is something that all who truly care about athletics and justice must do. As Roscher and Baeth write, “The current system is not enough. Trans and nonbinary athletes are asking us to look with them and see a more creative, vibrant sporting community.” Another world is possible, it is beautiful, and we should fight for it.

The post Let Them Play appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Wearing worn black jeans and a professorial tweed jacket, Rich Levy hoisted his fist into the air in the spotlight at the Alley Theatre, doing what he’s done so well for decades: Welcoming another bestselling author to Houston Inprint’s Margarett Root Brown Reading Series—the Bayou City’s sprawling nine-month-long book festival. 

Levy, both a ham and a nerd, is at ease under the spotlights. He can’t see their faces but he knows that dues-paying supporters fill the front rows at all Inprint performances, with an annual attendance of around 15,000.

Levy is the executive director of Inprint, a nonprofit best-known for this long-running star-studded author series, presented mostly on Mondays from September to May. Based in a modest house in Montrose, Inprint also offers writing workshops, book clubs, book talks in Spanish, an annual gala, author visits for children (“Cool Brains”), and poetry buskers who roam Houston’s Discovery Green armed with typewriters.

On Monday, March 23, Levy welcomed a new headliner—Alvaro Enrigue, a rangy irreverent Mexican-born author and academic. Levy figured Enrigue would stir things up given that his book, Now I Surrender, focuses on Geronimo’s fight for survival and Old West-attrocities committed by U.S. and Mexican soldiers in what 1880s maps once labeled “Apacheria.” But provoking a strong audience response is exactly what the seemingly mild-mannered Levy prefers.

Levy has long been the public face of Inprint. His opening schtick is part professorial, part P.T. Barnum and Stephen Colbert—a blend of dry humor and hucksterism with undertones from Levy’s deep personal well of literary worldliness, intellectual curiosity, and kindness. His formula begat success: During Levy’s 31-year-tenure, Khalil Gibran sold out the 2,200-seat Wortham Center. And Salman Rushdie sold out its even bigger 2,400-seat space. 

But audience reactions to Levy’s intros this season seemed particularly warm; Regulars all knew it was Levy’s last.

A poet with his own MFA credentials and a Chicago accent softened by years in the South, Levy has stamped his own imprint on Inprint. He’s created a welcoming community as well as a prestigious reading series that inspires deep conversations and attracts big names. As advertised in his own emcee patter, this series has featured winners of 13 Nobel Prizes, 74 Pulitzers, 49 National Book Awards and 23 U.S. Poets Laureate. Each year, those stats multiply.

Rich Levy at the Inprint office in Houston, next to a bookcase filled with the works of authors featured at the annual reading series. (Photo by Lise Olsen)

Things were different when Levy joined Inprint in August 1995 as E.D. In those days, he was Inprint’s only employee – and before and after work he often hauled around his three small kids in a Volvo station wagon. Any extra duties had to be handed off to a volunteer board.

Initially, the nonprofit was very closely tied to the University of Houston creative writing program, which it still supports through scholarships, grants and lectures from invited authors. Its first readings were intimate affairs, mostly featuring friends of Houston writers.

An early hire was Krupa Parikh, a Houston native and daughter of Indian immigrants, who started as a part-time administrative assistant while completing her master’s in social work—and somehow she never left. Parikh is now deputy director. 

“Houston reading series’ early audiences were modest and we were very locally focused,” she told the Texas Observer. “Over the years, I’ve seen Rich—and the organization—really open up. And I think that’s because Rich and the organization is now seen locally and nationally as a place you can come and you can do something great.”

By the late 1990s, reading series crowds strained the UH program auditorium’s capacity. “I mean, that was the problem,” Levy said. “We had Margaret Atwood in the reading series and there was a line going… from the theater up the stairs, out the door, down Main [Street] to Bissonnet, and then wrapping around the front of the museum.” 

The shortage of space—a problem spurred on by his own success— inspired Levy to partner with the Alley Theatre in downtown Houston and other performing arts venues like the Houston Opera, and Rice University’s concert hall.

Inprint remains based in a house in Montrose only blocks from the hip Menil Collection Museum (though its current HQ is larger than the original.) Over the decades, he’s assembled a 7-member team and helped parlay an angel investor’s $1 million into a solid $7 million endowment meant to ensure the organization’s future. Levy made fundraising look easy because he obviously sincerely believed in Inprint’s mission and wasn’t afraid to ask for money, Kevin Lewis, a longtime Inprint board member, told the Observer.

A bit like Saturday Night Live, some award-winning headliners have returned three or more times. Among them: Ann Patchett; Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, Louise Erdrich. But the host has long been Levy.

Each season has offered emotional, even euphoric, moments and behind-the-scenes glitches. One author marched off to explore downtown Houston, reappearing 120 seconds before showtime. Another cancelled last minute, after learning of his mother’s cancer diagnosis. (In a pre-cell phone era, the change forced Levy and other Inprint staff into the parking lot to explain in person to disappointed ticketed patrons.) 

Perhaps most memorably, Rushdie appeared on September 10, 2001 in Houston. It was the fourth stop in his first book tour after being targeted for death by Iran’s powerful Ayatollah Khomeini. Back then, Rushdie couldn’t fly commercial. “Random House got a private plane, so the first reading was in New York and then they flew him to Boston, Chicago and then Houson, ” Levy recalled. “Then it came to a grinding halt.” 

The reading went off without a hitch. Then on September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked the Pentagon and the twin towers in hijacked planes. All airports closed and Rushdie, who’d taken the precaution of booking a room under an anagram of his true name—DR. SHANE MAULIS—found himself no longer welcome at Houston’s Four Seasons hotel. 

Levy dashed downtown, discovering Rushdie stranded inside one of the hotel’s locked meeting rooms, surrounded by piles of soft drinks and bagged snacks. For the next three days, Rushdie shared the house of an Inprint supporter who’d gotten stuck out of town during the disaster (along with the owner’s pet sitter and pooch). 

Inprint’s juxtaposition of bestselling authors with backdrops of sets from the Alley’s plays in production created other memorable moments “One time it was One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and there were giant urinals in the background,” Levy recalled, chuckling. Another time, author John Updike arrived when the theatre was staging a play set in World War I. “He had to enter through a trench built into the set,” Levy explained. Updike was unfazed.

As Inprint grew and changed, so did Levy and his three children, who all left the nest. After his first marriage foundered, he found a new partner—a woman with ties to France who’d eventually prompt him to dream of retiring in Paris.

In 2014, Levy confronted a personal crisis when his beloved oldest daughter died of a prescription drug overdose on Earth Day at the age of 24. “It was probably the worst day we’ve ever had at the office,” Parikh recalled.

His daughter’s loss came during a wave of overdose deaths that struck Houston in the 2010s. Inprint was in the middle of its reading series—and Levy skipped emceeing one event. 

“She was our first adopted child, Rosie, and she was bipolar. We learned a vital lesson when we adopted children, and that is that nature is in charge. Nutrition can do some work, but nature is in charge,” Levy said. “And we thought it was the other way around and we could just provide the right environment and everything would be okay. It turned out not to be the case.”

When Levy returned to the stage a few weeks later, tears fell as he shared his daughter’s story with the many members he considers friends.

On March 9, 2020, the Alley Theatre was packed again for Louise Erdrich, a celebrated Native American novelist and indie bookstore owner who has appeared at Inprint’s series three times. Given the news of the pandemic spreading abroad, the nonprofit stocked sanitizer in the lobby, as a precaution, but no one was masked. Erdrich read from her new book, The Night Watchman, a tribute to her father. Days later, COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in Texas and everything shut down.

Events in 2020 and 2021 moved into Levy’s home office and onto Zoom. At some early online author talks, some tech-challenged presenters appeared in darkened rooms or wore oversized dorky headphones resembling earmuffs. Everyone was learning to adapt. “It was dodgy,” Levy recalled. 

These days, Inprint authors—carefully paired with local writers as expert moderators– once again appear before live audiences on Mondays, though recorded readings also are made available online later to members. 

On April 1, Levy handed over his own office inside the Inprint house to his designated successor Giuseppe Taurino, a UH creative writing graduate and the former executive director of another Houston nonprofit, Writers in the Schools. A longtime Inprint collaborator, Taurino is excited to build on the base left by Levy and his team. “There’s a real opportunity to deepen connection, invite more people into the work and make sure Inprint remains known for literary excellence while staying grounded in community,” Tauraino said in an announcement of his hiring.

Rich Levy with with author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Courtesy of Inprint; CJ Martin of RM Photography)

Together, Levy and Taurino traveled together to New York from April 28 to May 2 for another ritual: Inprint’s pre-season scouting tour. Once more, Levy pumped top publicists for details on authors of forthcoming bestsellers and up-and-coming writers with the right mix of edgy, compelling and diverse content for H-town readers. One of the 2025-26 season’s biggest draws was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian feminist known for her award-winning novels and TED talks on identity.

On May 4, Levy appeared at the Alley once more—collecting a standing ovation for his final intro. But Levy, Inprint’s recruiter, its impresario, its CEO, its chief fundraiser, won’t be on stage—or even in the crowd—when the 2026-27 series launches next September. His last day is June 30th. 

Soon, he’ll head off to a new home in the Paris suburbs, where he says he’s going to become a retired guy. “I’m gonna read and sleep and write some poems,” he said. “You know, I’m a poet. I have an MFA and all that.”

Levy managed to publish one book of poetry, entitled Why Me?, during his demanding years at Inprint. Now, Parikh said she hopes he will finally find time for his own work: “He’s made it possible for us to support and celebrate so many other writers that I hope he now gets to focus on himself,” she said.

One suspects, though, that next fall, despite the distance and time zone difference, he’ll tune into the latest installment of Inprint’s reading series—only this time he’ll be watching from the sidelines instead of in the spotlight.

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