Katy Vine
Katy Vine has been a staff writer at Texas Monthly since 2002. She has written on a range of topics including barbecue pit masters, spelling bee champs, Warren Jeffs, the moon landing, bass fishing, a three-person family circus, chess prodigies, and a reclusive musician named Jandek. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing 2005, The Best American Sports Writing 2006, and Best Food Writing 2011. Her 2005 feature story about an Odessa prostitution parlor was the inspiration for the Lifetime television series “The Client List.”
Stories
When flames erupted at the West Fertilizer Company plant, the members of the local volunteer fire department pulled on their bunker gear and jumped in their trucks, just like they always do.
Learning to love the foreign, overcharged, crowded, obsessive, and actually pretty exciting world of Texas’s newest major sport.
I was thrilled when my daughter began learning a second language at day care. But what was I supposed to do when my three-year-old started engaging in conversations I couldn’t understand?
Austin Mahone is sixteen years old. He doesn’t have a record contract, a tour bus, or a backing band. But he does have more than 650,000 followers on Twitter and the email addresses of 2,000,000 fans. Meet San Antonio’s answer to Justin Bieber.
John Mueller was the heir to one of the great Texas barbecue dynasties. Aaron Franklin was an unknown kid from College Station who worked his counter. John had it all and then threw it all away. Aaron came out of nowhere to create the state’s most coveted brisket. Then John rose from the ashes.
When Warren Jeffs fired his attorneys and decided to represent himself in his sexual assault trial, many predicted, accurately, that he would fail miserably. Few realized just what a wild show he would put on.
The Civil War may be 150 years old, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still stir up a fuss (Confederate license plate, anyone?). Just ask one of the hundreds of very accurately uniformed reenactors who descend on Jefferson every year to die for the cause.
Victor Emanuel can find you a hooded warbler, a horned guan, or maybe even an Eskimo curlew. But his real genius is that he can get you to really look at a grackle.
How a mild-mannered database analyst from Dallas became the undisputed king of extreme competitive deep-frying in Texas—which is to say, the world.
Our quiz shouldn’t be hard, so long as you’ve been paying attention. You have been paying attention, right?
Susan Hyde’s children were constantly in and out of the hospital with one illness or another. But were they the ones who were sick?
Last year’s child custody battle between the State of Texas and a fundamentalist Mormon sect prompted many people to wonder how 437 kids could have been ripped away from their parents. When the criminal trials of a dozen sect members get under way this month, the question may become, Was it really safe to send them home?