Twenty North Texas authors will set up shop inside Dallas's flagship Half Price Books this Saturday, signing and selling their own books first come, first served while readers hunt for prizes across the store. The second annual Local Author Crawl runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on August 22 at the chain's 5803 East Northwest Highway location, with free admission and a scavenger hunt that lets participants win a Half Price Books gift card.
The event pairs the Dallas-founded bookstore chain with the DFW Writers' Workshop, a nonprofit critique group with North Texas roots, according to the Dallas Observer. Genres on offer span mystery, fantasy, science fiction, horror, romance and upmarket fiction, alongside middle-grade adventure books, young adult novels and picture books for young children. Families can also visit a kid-friendly craft zone set up in the store's community room.
A Workshop Built On Weekly Critique
The DFW Writers' Workshop began in 1977 as a small circle of aspiring writers and has since grown to nearly 200 members who have collectively published more than 350 books, according to the organization. Its core activity remains simple: members read their work aloud and receive critique from peers, a practice that the workshop maintains has served as an incubator connecting authors across genres from middle-grade and YA to horror and fantasy. The group still meets every Wednesday at the Grapevine Convention Center.
Matthew Rollins, the workshop's vice president of programs, writes award-winning fantasy for young and adult readers, per the Observer's report. That grassroots structure feeds directly into events like the crawl, where authors sell and sign their own books independently while supplies last, offering free swag along the way.
From A Fort Worth Signing Table To The Today Show
Among the headlining names is Shawn Warner, described as a bestselling young adult author, whose path to that status began with a moment of internet infamy. In July 2023, a customer filmed Warner sitting at an empty book-signing table in Fort Worth, and the clip went viral on BookTok, propelling his debut novel Leigh Howard and the Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor to number one on Amazon, according to a Facebook post cited in event coverage. Warner later appeared on NBC's Today Show after the video drew millions of views.
Debut author Katie Bernet is bringing a different kind of national attention to the flagship store. Her YA thriller Beth Is Dead, which the Observer describes as reimagining Little Women as a whodunit, debuted through Simon & Schuster's Sarah Barley Books imprint in January and became a New York Times bestseller, according to Jane Friedman. The novel was also selected as the inaugural pick for Reese Witherspoon's Sunnie Reads book club, and Bernet directed the 2025 DFW Writers Conference.
Hollywood Deals And Six-Figure Contracts
Horror writer Russell C. Connor is bringing 17 published novels to the crawl. Connor joined the DFW Writers' Workshop in 2006 and previously served two years as its president, and he also hosts the annual Query Gong Show at the workshop's DFWCon conference, per the organization. Fantasy author C.C.S. Jones, known for award-winning fantasy featuring fierce heroines, rounds out the genre lineup alongside author-illustrator Sarah Mensinga, who has illustrated many books and has a graphic novel forthcoming from Abrams Books.
That forthcoming title follows a six-figure publishing deal Mensinga secured with Abrams for her middle-grade graphic novel Kindred Dragons, published in October 2025, and a second six-figure deal in December 2025 for her upcoming graphic novel Baby Teeth, according to Bleeding Cool. Mensinga previously worked as an animator on films including The Ant Bully. A. Lee Martinez, a workshop member since 1995, brings 13 traditionally published novels to his table; his novel Monster was adapted into the 2020 fantasy film Monster Run, now streaming on Netflix, while his 2016 novel The Last Adventure of Constance Verity was acquired by Legendary Pictures with Awkwafina attached to star, as reported by Collider.
A Store Built For Browsing
The flagship Half Price Books location opened in 1999 as a 54,000-square-foot facility that also houses the chain's corporate headquarters and more than 500,000 books, records, and games, and the building previously served as a Sterling jewelry facility in the 1950s. Half Price Books itself traces back to 1972, when Ken Gjemre and Pat Anderson founded the chain in a converted Dallas laundromat stocked with 2,000 personal books, growing it into America's largest family-owned new and used bookstore chain. Hoodline previously featured the flagship store among the top Lake Highlands destinations, noting its 1972 origins and on-site coffee shop.
Beyond one-day pop-ups like Saturday's crawl, the DFW Writers' Workshop maintains a permanent collection of more than 250 member-authored books archived in the Area History Room of the Grapevine Public Library, according to the organization. The workshop also produces DFWCon, an annual conference launched in 2008 that now draws more than 300 participants each fall and has been voted Best Writing Conference in Texas by readers of The Writer magazine, per Wikipedia.
