Arts & Letters Live, the venerable in-house literary series at the Dallas Museum of Art, announced its 2009 season. With 26 programs over a six-month period, Carolyn Bess and her team will be busy bringing the best and brightest of the book world to North Texas.

You know how you can learn a lot about a person by what they keep on their desk or what they write in their planner? You can play that game with the Arts & Letters Live season, too. Learn who you are by the names that make you squeal. I squealed for Alex Ross and David Sedaris, yet I’m intrigued by the pop-up book guy (and wondering if I can use pop-up book making strategies to decorate my duplex). Pop-up book guy will be leading creativity challenges in the Center for Creative Connections when he is here. He has a real name too (Robert Sabuda – rhymes with Pablo Neruda, but that may be a coincidence).

Here’s the rundown:

January – Stephanie Kallos, novelist, Broken for You and Sing Them Home; Sir Ken Robinson, author, The Element and Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative; David Macaulay, author and illustrator, The Way Things Work, The Way We Work and Pyramid; Wally Lamb, novelist, She’s Come Undone and The Hour I First Believed

Alex Ross

February – Jonathan Stroud, fantasy novelist, The Bartimaeus Trlogy and Heroes of the Valley; Texas Bound from Broadway: Food Fictions; Alex Ross, music critic and author, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century; Abraham Verghese, memoirist and novelist, Cutting for Stone, The Tennis Partner and My Own Country; Elizabeth Gilbert, memoirist, Eat, Pray, Love

March – Ian McEwan, novelist, Atonement; Judy Schachner, children’s author and illustrator, the Skippyjon Jones series, and R. L. LaFevers, children’s author, Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos;Texas Bound I; Dr. Zahi Hawass, archaeologist and lecturer, “Mysteries of Tutankhamun Revealed”

David Sedaris

April – M. T. Anderson, novelist, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing; Arthur Phillips, novelist, The Egyptologist and The Song is You; David Sedaris, satirist, memoirist, NPR superstar, This American Life (radio) and When You Are Engulfed in Flames

May – Sherman Alexie, novelist, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Colson Whitehead, novelist, The Intuitionist; Linda Sue Park, poet and children’s novelist, A Single Shard and Keeping Score; Texas Bound: The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009; Tony Horwitz, journalist and author, A Voyage Long and Strange, and David Grann, journalist, The Lost City of Z; Kathleen Kent, novelist, The Heretic’s Daughter, and Cristina Henriquez, novelist, The World in Half; Robert Sabuda, pop-up book artist, Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland