Who's Next?
A great sprinter in the making. A possible Supreme Court justice. Our favorite new jazz singer. Meet ten women who represent the best of Texas today—and tomorrow.
(Page 2 of 2)
Dao Strom
AUSTINITE DAO STROM (NÉE NGUYEN) WAS two years old when she fled Saigon with her mother, a journalist and publisher, in 1975. Her father, also a writer, stayed behind as the city fell to the Viet Cong. Some 27 years later she opens her impressive debut novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Houghton Mifflin), with a soul-searing fictionalization of her parents' harassment by the government in the waning days of South Vietnam's democracy. Strom's principal characters Tran, a single mother writing a newspaper serial inspired by Gone With the Wind, and her editor, who hides behind Tran's byline to print subversive articles—suffer trials (figurative and literal) that are vivid reminders of Vietnam's tumultuous early seventies. The plot of Grass Roof sags a bit when Tran and her children immigrate to California, but Strom's writing is flat-out wonderful. Houghton Mifflin plans to publish her second novel in spring 2004. With her unique perspective on the contemporary American immigrant experience and her knack for empathic detail, Strom ranks high among the most intriguing new voices on the Texas literary scene. MIKE SHEA
Hilary Duff
UNLESS YOU'RE A PARENT OF a girl in her tweens—that's, like, nine to fourteen—you probably haven't heard of Hilary Duff. But the perky, chirpy fifteen-year-old actress, who grew up in Houston and Boerne, was one of 2002's breakout stars. Seven nights a week on the Disney Channel, Duff plays the title character in Lizzie McGuire, a half-hour snapshot of middle-school angst that is one of the highest-rated shows on cable. (Repeats air Saturday mornings on Disney-owned ABC—ah, synergy.) She also sings the first song on the show's soundtrack CD, which went gold in December, and stars in two forthcoming movies: a big-screen version of Lizzie, which was shot last fall in Vancouver and Rome, and the teen spy flick Agent Cody Banks. And if that's not enough, her cartoon likeness is plastered all over the predictable bounty of Lizzie merchandise, from clothes to diaries. Not bad for a kid who got her start in acting classes at Saint Mary's Hall, in San Antonio. "I never thought this would happen," she says. "It's been so amazing. I do a scene and I go, 'Wow, is this really me?' I feel like a normal kid." EVAN SMITH
Juliet V. Garcia
JULIET GARCIAíA EXUDES THE sophistication of a South Texas doña and the wisdom of an educator who has spent years in the trenches. The 54-year-old is the president of the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College—the first Mexican American woman to head an American campus. Under her leadership at UTB/TSC, a university and a junior college that share facilities and an administration, more Latinos are becoming the first in their family to get a degree. Nationally, the majority of Latinos who want a college education start at a junior college, but many never make it to a university, in part because of the complicated transfer process. UTB/TSC, however, offers an innovative four-year program with a single course catalog and degree plan. It has become one of the fastest-growing universities in the UT System; the only American school that graduates more Latino math majors is Texas A&M. With a Ph.D. in communications and linguistics from UT-Austin, García is an inductee of the Texas Women's Hall of Fame, a former member of Bill Clinton's task force on Hispanic educational issues—and a natural leader for the future in a state where Latinos will soon be the largest ethnic group in the workforce. CECILIA BALLI
Misty Keasler
IN 2000 MISTY KEASLER GAINED national attention when her ambitious photo series on young heroin junkies in Plano—which juxtaposed a grotesque subculture and its suburban surroundings—was published in D Magazine and then featured on MSNBC. Before that, she had documented a friend's grueling eight months of chemotherapy. Lately, the 24-year-old Richardson resident has turned her unflinching eye on more-far-flung subjects, shooting orphanages in Romania, Russia, and India, gypsies in Romania, and New York City's Guardian Angels, a volunteer civilian crime patrol. The prestigious Photo District News magazine will name her one of thirty emerging talents in its March issue. Meanwhile, Keasler's images can be seen at Austin's Women and Their Work gallery in "Inside/Outside: Texas Women Photographers," a touring exhibit that debuts this month and includes prints chosen by Anne Wilkes Tucker, the photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Misty and her pictures are gutsy," says Tucker. "She's young, yet she has already spent long periods of time in foreign countries where she didn't know the language and managed an engagement with her subjects. And visually, she has a very restrained approach; she lets the viewer draw his or her own conclusions." KATY VINE
Priscilla Owen
EXCEPT FOR PRESIDENT BUSH FEW Americans stand to gain more from the new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate than Priscilla Owen. Last year, you'll recall, the 48-year-old justice of the Texas Supreme Court was nominated by the White House for a seat on the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, only to be derailed by the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Senate Republicans, she was the first nominee unanimously rated as "well qualified" by the American Bar Association to be rejected by the committee. Now the White House has resubmitted the controversial Austin jurist's nomination to a friendlier Senate. The battle lines will be the same: The New York Times has editorialized against her as "a choice that makes sense for . . . ideologues who want to turn the courts into a champion of big business, insurance companies, and the religious right," while Owen has said, "The picture that some special-interest groups have painted of me is wrong." This time, the outcome will likely be different. Owen should reach the Fifth Circuit—but for how long? Already she is being mentioned as a possible nominee for a U.S. Supreme Court seat if Bush wins a second term. PAUL BURKA
Sharon Hage
SHARON HAGE HAS NEVER KICKED anything up a notch in her life: "Subtlety" and "balance" are her bywords. The owner of tiny York Street restaurant in Dallas, the 38-year-old Hage has recently emerged as the best-known woman chef in Texas and has already begun to attract national attention (the New York Times and Esquire have paid her handsome compliments). In the year and a half since she bought York Street, the intensely focused Hage (rhymes with "stage") has made it a citywide dining destination for deliciously creative dishes. On a given evening you might get skate in caper-berry-and-tangerine brown butter, peppered Texas fallow-deer venison with pomegranate-spiced couscous, or a soft-scrambled duck egg with black truffle crème. Like California's Alice Waters, to whom she has been compared, Hage insists on purity and freshness, serving organically raised produce and meat as much as possible. Luckily for Texans, the Detroit native has no intention of leaving Dallas, her home since 1991. "People ask if I want to move up—or on," she says, "but I'm exactly where I want to be." PATRICIA SHARPE
Pages: 1 2
My Library
