Headliners and Lineup Announced for the Deep Vellum Music & Literature Festival

For Immediate Release:

Deep Vellum Music & Literature Festival
July 10-12, 2026
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas

Deep Vellum is thrilled to announce Hanif Abdurraqib and Jamila Woods as the headliner artists for the inaugural Deep Vellum Music & Literature Festival. 

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) was a New York Times Bestseller and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. 

Jamila Woods is a musician, poet, and multidisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago.  Her critically acclaimed debut album HEAVN – an ode to Blackness, girlhood, and home – was released by JagJaguwar Records in 2017. Her most recent album, Water Made Us, is a genre-blending song cycle on love and the wisdom of surrender. Jamila has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. An award-winning poet, Jamila’s work often blurs boundaries between poem and song.

Abdurraqib and Woods will be performing at the Deep Vellum Music & Literature Festival’s headlining event at Sons of Hermann Hall on Saturday, July 11, 2026. Abdurraqib will perform a reading of his work, followed by a conversation with Lawrence Burney — writer, editor, critic, and the founder of True Laurels, an independent magazine covering Baltimore’s music and culture scene. DAMOYEE, an award-winning multi-hyphenate music artist from Dallas, TX, will open for Woods’ headlining performance of music and poetry.

The Deep Vellum Music & Literature Festival welcomes over 34 literary and music artists to its inaugural lineup. The festival will take shape across 11 venues in the Deep Ellum neighborhood, through 15-plus events and activations. The festival will have a Friday night kick-off event at Ruins, sponsored by the Southwest Review, featuring a panel on Latin American literature in translation with Carmen Boullosa, Rodrigo Hasbún, and Robin Myers, followed by music performances by Ceci Ceci and Cayuga All-Stars.

The Deep Vellum Music & Literature Festival is supported by a number of Texas-based arts and culture entities, including the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Deep Ellum Foundation, the Southwest Review, and the Texas Book Festival, which will be hosting its own panel on Saturday July 11. 

Full lineup and ticketing is live on deepvellum.org.

For media inquiries, please contact: madison@deepvellum.org

(Hanif photo by Kate Sweeney. Jamila photo by Ashley Chappell.)