On the eve of the Las Vegas Book Festival, it bears noting that 2026 has been a very good year for Southern Nevada authors.
The list of authors who were published by notable imprints is hardly short. Among them: Maile Chapman, Amanda Skenadore, Alexandra McCollum, Krista Diamond, Erin Singer, Nicholas Russell, and Karen Mack. Pahrump-raised resident and University of Nevada Reno graduate Claire Vaye Watkins also put out her third novel, "Yellow Pine." (All this, to say nothing of the usual yearly releases from University of Nevada Press and Las Vegas-based Huntington Press.)
All in all, local authors seem like they're thriving more than ever. But what circumstances allowed this boom to happen?
"Part of the reason has to just be chalked up to coincidence," said Drew Cohen, co-owner and buyer for the Writer's Block bookstore in downtown Las Vegas. "I think that it just so happened that all of these books and these projects were brewing at roughly the same time and came to fruition in the same season. But it was funny, I could see from a mile away that this year was shaping up to be a big one for Vegas writers and books based in Vegas. I mean, I wonder about the degree to which publishing and creative writing has become fragmented and decentralized in the wake of COVID. ... I think there's just more of an appetite for fiction that is concerned with the rest of the country, and Vegas is the rest of the country. It's not Brooklyn."
Chapman — who released her second novel, The Spoil, in the spring — teaches for the UNLV English and creative writing departments. And some of her students are already published, many of them having vastly different publishing tracks than Chapman experienced herself as a young writer.
"I'm teaching a graduate seminar right now, and two of the Ph.D students already have published books," she said. "So that timeline is shifting, and perhaps is less about publishing after, and sometimes about publishing before coming into the program. Everyone's path is so different, and as I was sort of looking over the list of people whose books have come out recently or will be coming out, a lot of them are presses that are new or that have been around for a couple of years, and that are publishing an amazing variety of books. And I think that, again, people are finding their own way through the publishing industry in a way that is slightly different than maybe it was when I was coming up, where big imprints were what people were hoping for, and perhaps the idea of what fit means with a publisher is changing."
Guests: Drew Cohen, co-owner and buyer, Writer's Block; Maile Chapman, associate professor, UNLV
