Joe Holley

Native Texan: Stories from Deep in the Heart is a lively and personal tour of small town and big city Texas in search of what makes the state unique. Nationally acclaimed columnist Joe Holley is widely loved for his popular “Native Texan” column, which appears in the Houston Chronicle. In thirty stories curated from column archives, Holley introduces readers to his favorite people and places across the state. From interviews on the “weird” streets of Austin and his search for ghosts in Bigfoot to a decades-long love affair with everything about Marathon and hikes on the back trails of the Big Bend, Holley is a masterful storyteller. His instincts are backed by a seasoned journalist’s passion to measure legends and tall tales against investigations into what really happened. He reveals small-town Texas, and some small towns within the largest cities, with a style that has proven popular with readers and a keen eye for a unique spin on an old story. The result is an entertaining and certainly surprising view of the Lone Star state.

Cary Clack has captured the hearts and minds of Texans since the mid-1990s, gaining a national reputation as an incisive and sensitive journalist and developing a significant following as a columnist. Originally from San Antonio, he worked with the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta (writing CNN commentaries for Coretta Scott King) to hone his communication skills and broaden his social sensibilities. Returning to his hometown, he quickly became known as a writer who profiled everyday heroes and captured stories unique to the Texas experience, adding a critical local perspective to national news. His columns are infused with a sense of humility and a keen examination of the humanness in others. Following sixteen years as a journalist, Clack pursued interests in politics, social policy, and service, including work with the mayor of San Antonio, U. S. congressman Joaquin Castro, and others. More Finish Lines to Cross is a collection of Clack’s best short- and long-form columns since his return to the San Antonio Express-News in 2019. It includes more than eighty pieces about the issues of the day, from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the war in Ukraine to the impact of COVID, the death of George Floyd, and the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. Along the way we meet the people who influenced Clack, which in turn reminds us to reflect on how we become the people we are and what inspires us to be better members of our communities.

According to author Joe Holley, the story of the Texas Electric Cooperatives, a collective of some 76 member-owned electric providers throughout the state, is a story of neighborliness and community, grit and determination, and persuasion and political savvy. It’s the story of a grassroots movement that not only energized rural Texas but also showed residents the power they have when they band together to find strength in unity. Opening with the coming of electricity to Texas’ major cities at the turn of the twentieth century, Power: How the Electric Co-op Movement Energized the Lone Star State describes the dramatic differences between urban and rural life. Though the major cities of Texas were marvels of nighttime brilliance, the countryside remained as dark as it had been for centuries before. It was not economical for the startup electrical companies to provide service to far-flung rural areas, so they were forced to do without. Beginning with the New Deal–era efforts of Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and others, Holley chronicles the birth and development of the electric cooperative movement in Texas, including the 1935 federal act that created the Rural Electrification Administration. Holley concludes with the devastation wrought by Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 and the intense debate that continues around climate resilience and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), overseer of the state’s electric grid, all of which has profound implications for rural electric cooperatives who receive their allocations according to procedures administered by ERCOT. Power is sure to enlighten, entertain, and energize readers and policymakers alike.

With a laugh, Laura Lewis says of her art, 'I am uncomfortable painting mountains, because they get in the way of the view'. The challenge for this High Plains realist is to create strong compositions out of the extreme horizontals that predominate her chosen artistic geography. As the works in this book will attest, Lewis excels in capturing the views discovered in her ramblings across the length and breadth of the region she has dubbed the 'Great Plains of Texas'. Her paintings are a celebration of the land and the people that capture the distilled essence of a place that has formed her vision and her understanding of what it means to be at home. Opening with a foreword by longtime columnist and Texas observer Joe Holley, At Home on the Great Plains of Texas offers images of paintings that Lewis intends as 'a glass of cool water for anyone thirsting for the beauty to be found here'. The paintings are interspersed with vignettes by Christina Mulkey, a writer whom Lewis invited to accompany her on many of her 'image safaris.'Collectors, scholars, and historians have long known about and frequently commented on the centrality of place in Texas art. With the paintings in At Home on the Great Plains of Texas, Laura Lynn Lewis takes her place among the ranks of those who teach us the art of transformative perception; we learn how to 'attend', in Mulkey's words. In seeing the arid, broad vistas of Lewis's home country, we better understand how to appreciate our own landscapes of belonging.

Sutherland Springs was the last place anyone would have expected to be victimized by our modern-day scourge of mass shootings. Founded in the 1850s along historic Cibolo Creek, the tiny community, named for the designated physician during the siege of the Alamo, was once a vibrant destination for wealthy tourists looking to soak up the "cures" of its namesake mineral springs. By November 5, 2017, however, the day a former Air Force enlistee opened fire in the town's First Baptist Church, killing twenty-six people, Sutherland Springs was a shadow of its former self. Twenty-six people died that Sunday morning, in the worst mass shooting in a place of worship in American history. Holley, who roams the Lone Star State as the "Native Texan" columnist for the Houston Chronicle and earned a Pulitzer- Prize nomination for his editorials about guns, spent more than a year embedded in the community. Long after most journalists had left, he stayed with his fellow Texans, getting to know a close-knit group of people - victims, heroes, and survivors. Marked by both a deep faith in God and in guns, Holley shows how they work to come to terms with their loss and to rebuild shattered lives. He also uses the Sutherland Springs' unique history and its decades-long decline as a prism for understanding how an act of unspeakable violence reflects the complicated realities of Texas and America in the twenty-first century.

On November 1, 2017, the Houston Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in an epic seven game battle to become 2017 World Series champs. For the Astros, the combination of a magnificently played series, a 101-victory season and the devastation Hurricane Harvey brought to their city was so incredible it might give Hollywood screenwriters pause. The nation's fourth-largest city, still reeling in the wake of disaster, was smiling again. The Astros' first-ever World Series victory is a great baseball story, but it's also the story of a major American city - a city (and a state) that the rest of the nation doesn't always love or understand - becoming a sentimental favorite because of its grace and good will in response to the largest natural disaster in American history. The Astros' miracle season is also the fascinating tale of a thoroughly modern team. Constructed by NASA-inspired analytics, the team's data-driven system took the game to a more sophisticated level than the so-called Moneyball approach. The team's new owner, Jim Crane, bought into the system and was willing to endure humiliating seasons in the baseball wilderness with the hope, shared by few initially, that success comes to those who wait. And he was right. But no data-crunching could take credit for a team of likeable, refreshingly good-natured young men who wore "Houston Strong" patches on their jerseys and meant it-guys like shortstop Carlos Correa, who kept a photo in his locker of a Houston woman trudging through fetid water up to her knees. The Astros foundation included George Springer, a powerful slugger and rangy outfielder; third-baseman Alex Bregman, whose defensive play and clutch hitting were crucial in the series; and, of course, the stubby and tenacious second baseman José Altuve, the heart and soul of the team. HURRICANE SEASON is Houston Chronicle columnist Joe Holley's moving account of this extraordinary team-and the extraordinary circumstances of their championship.

This novel explores the underbelly of the almost always politically incorrect world of politics and campaigning in Texas in the 1980s. Rose Marie Ryder made a name for herself by becoming the first female state comptroller of Texas and she is now running to become the first woman U. S. senator from the Lone Star State. Ryder's campaign team is a potluck of misfits and miscreants: a has-been evangelist's son who once ran a string of mobile massage parlors, veterans of the civil rights struggles, Austin lesbian activists, old-school political operatives with sterling motives and shady morals, and then there is Wily T. Foxx. Until he joined the campaign, almost entirely by accident, Wily's passion in life had been cock fighting. Now he is literally the candidate's purse bearer, a combination bodyguard/campaign worker, privy to all of the political intrigue found on the campaign trail. In a state where the dead can rise and walk to the polls, ballot boxes can grow fat in counties with more cattle than people, and the votes of common folk can be disqualified on a whim, this lively and insightful novel captures the absurd and timeless qualities of running for political office.

Dan Jenkins calls him “the greatest quarterback who ever lived, college or pro.” Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, who played for TCU and the Washington Redskins, single-handedly revolutionized the game of football. While the pros still wore leather helmets and played the game more like rugby, Baugh’s ability to throw the ball with rifle-like accuracy made the forward pass a strategic weapon, not a desperation heave. Like Babe Ruth, who changed the very perception of how baseball is played, Slingin’ Sam transformed the notion of offense in football and how much yardage can be gained through the air. As the first modern quarterback, Baugh led the Redskins to five title games and two NFL championships, while leading the league in passing six times-a record that endures to this day-and in punting four times. In 1943, the triple-threat Baugh also scored a triple crown when he led the league in passing, punting, and interceptions. Slingin’ Sam is the first major biography of this legendary quarterback, one of the first inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Joe Holley traces the whole arc of Baugh’s life (1914–2008), from his small-town Texas roots to his college ball success as an All-American at TCU, his brief flirtation with professional baseball, and his stellar career with the Washington Redskins (1937–1952), as well as his later career coaching the New York Titans and Houston Oilers and ranching in West Texas. Through Holley’s vivid descriptions of close-fought games, Baugh comes alive both as the consummate all-around athlete who could play every minute of every game, on both offense and defense, and as an all-around good guy.