Texas Pages

As part of the opening weekend celebration of the Center for Creative Connections, the Dallas Museum of Art is offering free admission on Saturday and Sunday. As part of the fun, it's hosting a Define-a-Thon event where you can test your vocabulary. It's Saturday at 5 p.m. (registration is at 4 p.m. at the Arts & Letters Live table in the Councourse). For more details, check it out here.

Here's what's in store for readers of GuideLive on Sunday:

Staff critic Chris Vognar takes a look at a pair of books that offer a look at early 20th-century black America: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas Blackmon, and Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa, by Collin Grant.

Tom Dodge gets underneath the skin of Infected, by Scott Sigler.

Joy Tipping examines the stories of Kevin Brockmeier in The View From the Seventh Layer.

Christine Granados celebrates the new release of The Complete Works of Tomas Rivera.

Alexandra Witze finds science in action in In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA, by James Schwartz.

Rick Barrick files these reports:

James "Boobie" Miles (left) and author H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger recount events during the tumultuous 1988 football season at Permian High School at an event in Mansfield on April 25. Mr. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, a nonfiction book centered on Odessa, was the subject of the One City, One Book program sponsored by the Friends of the Mansfield Public Library. Mr. Miles was the star running back of the Permian Panthers whose injury ended his football career and derailed his team's quest to win the state championship. Friday Night Lights, published in 1990, has become a film and a current television show.

First lady Laura Bush and her daughter, Jenna Bush, add their signatures Wednesday to the book they wrote, "Read All About It." The Bushes appeared at the Borders store at Preston Road and Royal Lane beginning at about 6:25 p.m. Borders issued about 800 wristbands that entitled each holder to as many as three signed books. The store began passing out wristbands at 9 a.m., but the rush of buyers caused Borders to ran out of books temporarily at about 10 a.m. More books arrived shortly afterward.

If the words "Harry Potter," "Aldus Dumbledore" and "gay" make your pulse quicken, get over to the Religion blog, where Jeffrey Weiss discovers some thoughts on J.K. Rowling from Connie Neal, a conservative Christian author who had been one of the first to publicly defend the Potter books.

I'm on a cloud floating by and I've gone mad but madness flows away in a tall shining work of Art and I'm standing in front of a fountain and the world's ringing down through me and there are no fields of migrants mixing hair and bone into concrete.

This line originally appeared in The DMQ Review. Rauan will be tonight's featured reader at the Dallas Poets Community open mic at 7 p.m. at Half Price Books on Northwest Highway.