The Friends of the TCU Library, in partnership with TCU Press, have announced that author Rick Bass will receive this year’s TCU Texas Book Award at a dinner Tuesday, April 16 in the Champions Club of Amon Carter Stadium on campus. The cocktail reception begins at 6:30 p.m. with dinner to follow.

The Texas Book Award is given every two years to honor the best book published about Texas. Bass’s latest work A Thousand Deer: Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country is lyrical, heartfelt and deeply intelligent in ways that appeal even to non-hunters.

Born in Fort Worth in 1958, Bass grew up in the suburbs of Houston where he roamed the swamps and woods along Buffalo Bayou. The book describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood when his commitment to the hunt had evolved into a commitment to family and preserving the last wild places in the land.

Bass is the author of 27 books of both fiction and nonfiction, including The Wild March, Why I Came West and The Lives of Rocks. Several of his works have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award, as we as The New York Times and Los Angeles Times “Best Book of the Year” award.

He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundations, and his short stories and essays have received O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes. They have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing and Best Spiritual Writing.

The TCU Press has traditionally published the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As the Press has grown steadily in stature and in its ability to bring credit to TCU over the last 20 years, it has been praised for publishing regional fiction, which often doesn’t find a market in New York, and for discovering and preserving local history.

Reservations for the event are $30 per person and can be made with Shelda Dean at 817-257-7696.