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.

The post Leaving His Mark On Houston’s Inprint appeared first on The Texas Observer.

For decades, March 31 was marked with civil rights marches, school commemorations, and community celebrations honoring Cesar Chavez and the labor leader’s championing of better working conditions for farmworkers. In California and Texas, his birthday was a state holiday.

But when The New York Times published its investigation earlier this year on how Chavez groomed and sexually abused two girls and raped civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, the news ripped through the very spaces that had long organized to keep Chavez’s memory alive. Since then, a public reckoning has taken shape with communities revisiting Chavez’s legacy and grappling with how to disentangle him from the history of the broader farmworker movement and the ongoing fight for Latino equality in the United States.

That reckoning includes a proposal by U.S. Senator John Cornyn to abolish the César E. Chávez National Monument in California, which became the first national monument associated with contemporary Latino history when it was established in 2012. The monument comprises the United Farm Workers union’s former headquarters and compound, known as La Paz—in the Tehachapi Mountains northeast of Los Angeles—where Chavez’s abuse took place. 

Sehila Mota Casper, executive director of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, is among the signatories of a joint letter opposing the proposal, citing concerns it would undermine federal recognition of the broader legacy of the farmworker movement. The Texas Observer spoke with Mota Casper in late April about what it means to approach this moment through a community-centered lens and how historic preservation can involve reexamining what was once considered settled history.

TO: In the aftermath of the revelations about Cesar Chavez’s abuse, we’ve seen institutions and communities act quickly. Cities moved to rename streets. Murals disappeared overnight in some places. Is there harm that can come from this sort of action if it’s done too quickly, even if the intent is accountability? 

The harm can be whenever we react too quickly, and that’s really what I saw throughout the U.S. … instead of allowing the community to come together, give community time to process, and come up with a community solution. 

We saw a lot of individuals from a top-down level beginning to make decisions for community rather than engaging them in this. The reason why I say that is because the farmworker movement was about hundreds and thousands of individuals. Whenever you narrow it down and when there are individuals that are still assigning one movement to one man, then that’s where that can be detrimental.

With the proposal by John Cornyn to abolish the Cesar Chavez Monument in California, is the risk that you would lose not only the monument and its designation but also how the farmworker movement is recognized at the federal level?

That’s right.

We had just had a directive from our state governor trying to remove the Cesar Chavez Day, and then Cornyn came out with this bill to not only remove and cancel the Cesar Chavez Monument but to eliminate all of the federal land [associated with the monument]. 

What we saw was like a knee-jerk reaction responding to this … when in fact this history doesn’t belong to anyone other than farmworkers, their descendants, and Latinos. 

What does accountability on this front look like when it is defined by community and not elected officials? 

This decision really requires that we think about history not in a reactionary way but that we’re very intentional in the way we’re approaching a story, a narrative, especially in real time as it’s unfolding. Myself, as a historian, I know that narratives change over time. It is very common that these narratives change over time. It’s also very common that news and information comes up. Because of that, we have to be able to then reinterpret this history, reinterpret this story, or in this case reinterpret the monument. 

I think accountability means that those that are in leadership positions or positions of power step aside and recognize this is much greater than their positions. This is about people. This is about their parents, their children. It’s about Latino history, Asian Pacific Islander history, farmworker and labor history, and because of that we know that the decision needs to go up from community. And that would be justice because then each community would be able to say, “We don’t want to celebrate the Cesar Chavez Day. Instead, let’s have the national or state Farmworker Day.”

We see murals that are compilations of storytelling in a small community and Cesar Chavez could be one small face in this overall story of the Latinos within that community, but that doesn’t mean that we just need to whitewash the entire mural. Whenever you have a decision like that, you’re literally wiping out all of this history, all these decades of individual contributions and movement and erasing it just because we’re then assigning it to one person.

There’s a lot of pain here. There’s the harm done to Dolores Huerta and the other women who came forward. There are people who had pictures of Cesar Chavez up in their home or folks whose activism was informed or inspired by the work of Chavez, Huerta, and the farmworker movement. How do you make space for that pain in that process? 

When we think about the narrative around these histories, especially around the Chavez national monument park, that decision should come from the individuals that were directly harmed. That decision should come from women, from individuals that used to live at La Paz. 

We have to have the correct individuals at the table that are helping lead these conversations. It should be taken out of politics and supported by individuals that are trauma-informed, that are trained in these practices and that are also historians and preservationists like myself, where we’ve worked with difficult histories. … Maybe it’s a situation where we find another location. Maybe it’s a situation where we keep that location because that’s what community wants, but we remove this from being a hero-focused story.

There’s long been an underrepresentation of Latinos in the accountings of our history. Latinos have also been kept at the margins of who has the authority and the power to shape how we remember. Add on to that, the ongoing debates about history can even be taught in this country. What has to change structurally to avoid repeating these patterns? 

I grew up in a time here in Texas where we did not have the farmworker movement in our history books.

Having these foundational things like an educational exposure to these types of histories along with having these truthful conversations within the public narrative of saying, “Are we going to be truthful in our storytelling or are we going to continue glossing over this?”—those are the types of things that educate us as a community, educate us as people, and allow us then to evolve.

Dolores Huerta in Austin on October 9, 2018 (Gus Bova)

We run a lot of potential risk of repeating patterns. If we had not brought this up, we would not be talking so much about the safety of women in the farmlands or within a male-dominated field. We wouldn’t be talking so much and reacting so quickly about sexual assaults on children if this didn’t surface. Immediately, we saw Latinos begin to break that pattern. 

In this case, in real time, we recognized what was occurring and in doing so and speaking out and having a really strong voice, we were ensuring that we’re not going to repeat these patterns, that we’re talking about it, and that we’re forcing ourselves to create solutions around it. 

What have you felt is missing from the conversation about how to handle Chavez’s legacy and the legacy of the broader farmworker movement? 

I believe that the biggest thing that’s missing is community voice. I’m really happy that this is getting so much national dialogue. It deserves that. But we also need to be speaking with farmworkers—United Farm Workers and the farmers that are working out in the fields,  individuals that are second- and third-generation farmworkers.

Within historic preservation and within the realms of academia and history, I’m seeing a primary focus on Chavez rather than beginning to really think about what an equitable solution model could look like—one where women of color are put forward in this narrative and one where farmworkers and the other civil rights [activists are put forward]. 

I’m beginning to think about how can we, in a sensitive manner, be able to move forward and lead by example on how future generations can actually confront such situations and be able to retell a narrative that needs to be retold.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Reckoning with History: What Should Become of the Cesar Chavez National Monument? appeared first on The Texas Observer.