Last August, UNT announced it was creating an annual poetry prize worth ten grand. The Rilke Prize is to be awarded to a ‘mid-career poet’ who’s written a work the past year of “exceptional artistry.” And now they’ve found one.

Street artist Shepard Fairey got a lot of media attention while he was here this past week, painting wall murals around town. But he was also signing books, selling clothing and spinning tracks at a dance party. Welcome to the Dallas Contemporary’s New Model Art Museum: part-nightclub, part-style magazine, part idea factory.

… which doesn’t really lead to a punchline because Thursday’s roundtable, sponsored by Art & Seek and the Dallas Museum of Art, actually led to a wide-ranging, intelligent conversation about the local contemporary arts scene.

Cowboys Stadium is already known for the contemporary art on its walls. Now it’ll have an opera on its massive video screen – Mozart’s The Magic Flute, live from the Dallas Opera’s production at the Winspear Opera House.

Conductor Jaap van Zweden is getting a proclamation from Mayor Rawlings this week — while financially, the DSO has shifted from staving off insolvency to trying to retire its multi-million dollar deficit.

Conservative Christians are forcing the interrogation of a freethinker. It’s 1656 in Amsterdam. And the fate of the city’s entire Jewish population is at stake. Did we mention that David Ives’ New Jerusalem can be pretty funny?

Both sides of the metroplex are generating new operas — but in different ways. And the big beneficiary has been Jake Heggie, composer of Moby-Dick.

The past two years, a dozen North Texas arts groups — including some of the biggest — have scrambled to hire a new managing director or CEO. Why have they become so hard to find? And why do the arts need them, anyway?

Continuing our series on North Texas artists worth watching in the New Year. Adam Adolfo brought Latino theater back to Fort Worth’s Artes de la Rosa. And this year that Latino theater is going to include a goblin, surrealism and some Argentine flair.

#2 in our series, looking to people in North Texas arts worth keeping an eye on in 2012. Ben Fountain made a literary splash in 2006. This spring he’s back with his scathing, funny, debut novel. Young vets on a ‘victory tour’ for the Iraq War come to Texas Stadium — to meet Beyonce and the Cowboys on Thanksgiving.