Aralyn Hughes

For over 33 years, Aralyn Hughes has been an Austin icon sharing her own brand of weird, as reported by Bill Geist of CBS Morning News when he crowned her the “Queen of Weird”. Hughes has appeared as an ambassador for Austin on HGTV, Discovery Channel, both national and local CBS networks, various radio stations, and local Austin venues including Zachary Scott Theater. She’s performed at two international storytelling festivals, Winnipeg Fringe and San Miguel Storytelling Festivals.

She was the co-author of In the West, one of the longest-running monologue theatre shows in Austin, which also graced the Kennedy Center and was later adapted into the movie Deep in the Heart. At 65, Hughes became a performance artist, storyteller and nonfiction monologist. Following her local acclaim, she’s performed at the International Solo Theater Festival, San Miguel Storytelling, and Winnipeg Fringe Festival.

The subject of a documentary, Love in the Sixties is a story of one small-town woman from Oklahoma, who came of age in the 60s, taking on serious baby boomer questions about love, sex and death. Her first book, an anthology about child-free women who came of age in the 1960s, was also recently published in three languages. Kid Me Not features stories of women who made the decision to not have children at the advent of the birth control pill.