Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women's health care in Texas.
Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.
Houston’s West University area was just a quiet, unpretentious neighborhood until the bulldozers moved in. Now everyone’s trying to keep up with the Georgians.
What kind of woman gets her own skin-care company, a place in Nouvelle Society, and the second-most-eligible bachelor in the world? Meet Georgette Mosbacher.
The resurrection of a former “see-through” office building. How a land developer diversified—into Jaguars. And secrets of the “vultures” who buy up, fix up, and fill up troubled Houston apartments.
In the town George Parr once dominated, a nineteen-year-old mother was gang-raped by her neighbors. In the aftermath of the crime, the old horrors of San Diego have surfaced anew.
Houston’s city controller prided himself on being the most scrupulously honest politician in town. So why did he sign his name to someone else credit card?
Texas’ most famous dress designer dreamed up the perfect evening gown for the average American woman—it’s frilly, it’s flashy, and it’s a $300 copy of a $15,000 Paris original.
While U.S. businessmen and Mexican bureaucrats see her as the answer to their economic prayers, factory worker Graciela Fernández just tries to get by—on about 66 cents an hour.
San Antonio city councilman Bernardo Eureste took a paltry arts budget and built it into a $3 million power base. Then he got mad and tore it all apart.
There are a hundred of them, and their job is invisibility. They come into giant office buildings after everyone has gone home and, if they do the job right, make the evidence of the day’s work disappear.
From Requiem for a Margarita.1/2 ounce of Triple Sec (1 tablespoon)1 ounce of fresh lime juice 1 1/2 ounces of light tequilaMaking the best margarita in town—at home—is not a matter of money. It does not depend on buying the best tequila or substituting classy Cointreau for the cheaper
