Readers are Leaders

Deep Vellum Publishing founder gets people to think about literature in a new way

New York may be the center of the publishing universe, but not if Deep Vellum founder Will Evans has anything to do with it. Evans has ambitious plans for our city’s role in the literary landscape, even if he ended up here more or less accidentally.

“To be fair, I didn’t choose Dallas, Dallas chose me,” he explains. “My wife got a job here, so we moved in 2013. I created Deep Vellum around what Dallas has and doesn’t have: There’s a great arts community, and it’s not tapped out.

“The digital revolution has changed how we read and find out about stuff,” Will Evans says. “You can live in a place like Dallas and be part of the conversation.”

“It’s the future of publishing to be in a decentralized place. The digital revolution has changed how we read and find out about stuff. You can live in a place like Dallas and be part of the conversation.”

With a mission of publishing international literature in English translation, Evans was drawn to UTD’s literary translations program, one of the best in the country. SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences dean Thomas DiPiero is also “a big supporter of translations,” according to Evans, assuring there will be plenty of home-grown talent emerging in the next few years to work with Evans’ stable of authors.

Deep Vellum introduced its first volume, Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa, last December, and the house has a chock-full roster coming out this spring and summer, led by its second published book, The Art of Flight, by legendary Mexican author Sergio Pitol. One of the most prominent, influential and awarded authors in the Spanish-speaking world, Pitol has nonetheless never been translated into English — until now. The Art of Flight is the first in a trilogy of the author’s works that Deep Vellum will release.

Events like March 18’s Art of Flight release party led by translator George Henson at Wild Detectives, Evans’ GalleryLab talk on translation and interpretive art the following night at Nasher Sculpture Center, and a reading with Icelandic author (and former Reykjavik mayor) Jón Gnarr at the Detectives in mid-April are just a few of the ways Evans hopes to engage the local literary community.

“How many people read 50 Shades of Grey? Smart people, people I respect — that book doesn’t have any qualitative value at all,” says Evans. “There’s been an insular trend in culture, and the lack of reading in translations is emblematic of that.

“Having cool events, getting people to read books and realize they’re part of their lives locally — it’s really amazing to try and get people to think about literature in a new way.”

Deep Vellum Publishing founder Will Evans.

Photo by Lindsey Miller

Deep Vellum Publishing founder Will Evans.

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Mural News

Netflix House will debut in Dallas with murals from acclaimed artist

Netflix House

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix House

A long-awaited immersive venue is opening in Dallas, and it will debut with local art on its walls: Netflix House, a year-round exhibit revolving around Netflix shows and movies, will open at Galleria Dallas on December 11, with two murals from award-winning Dallas multi-medium artist Jeremy Biggers.

Netflix House is an immersive dive complete with merchandise store, film house, arcade, and restaurant-bar. When it opens, Dallas will be the second location in the U.S., following Philadelphia, where it debuted in November 2025, also with murals from a local artist.

A graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, Biggers is a renowned artist whose murals can be found spashed on walls across Dallas. Many, such as the Selena portrait on the wall outside Top Ten Records at 306 S. Bishop Ave., have become local landmarks.

He's a logical choice, having worked with a number of corporations including Nike, Adidas, the Dallas Mavericks, and IBM, for whom he created the "THINK" mural in their Dallas corporate office. His works have also been exhibited nationally, including a 2024 solo exhibition "be safe out there bro" at Band of Vices, a gallery in Los Angeles.

"Being chosen to be the artist to paint this mural, it would have been a disservice to myself, as well as the art scene in the city, not to try to infuse myself into it," he says.

$\u200bJeremy Biggers at Netflix House$ Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

Biggers did two murals featuring his interpretation of Netflix figures including the Squid Game Young-hee doll, characters from KPop Demon Hunters and megahit series Stranger Things, plus Pandy and DJ Catnip, the best friends in the interactive series Gabby’s Dollhouse.

Both murals are intensely colored works that incorporate Biggers' signature motif: a grid of polka dots spread across the image.

One is on the exterior of Netflix House, at the parking entrance, a colorful collage of characters, measuring 38 feet x 50 feet — the tallest mural Biggers has tackled. He painted it with aerosol; it took him two months to complete.
The other is on the interior, on the mall side entrance of Netflix House, measuring 57 feet x 12 feet — a study in moody blacks and blues, with accents of neon-red that give it a 3D effect.

“I'm trying to tell the story of Netflix, and the story of where Netflix has been historically, where Netflix is headed in the future, and then also infusing my own narrative and my own language visually into that story,” he says.

“They could have opened this anywhere, so for Dallas to be one of the very first locations — that’s a testament to us as a market, as consumers of arts and consumers in general," he says.

Jeremy Biggers at Netflix HouseNetflix House

galleries openings