Partial List of Authors Announced for Second-Annual Boston Book Festival
(Press Release) Boston—The highly anticipated second-annual Boston Book Festival will take place on Oct. 16, 2010, in various locations around Copley Square. Festival Founder and Director Deborah Z. Porter today announced a partial list of authors confirmed to appear at this year’s event. The featured authors announced now hint at the wide array of programming to come, and include Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Laureates, children’s writers, and writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry:
- Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home)
- A.M Homes (This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers)
- Gish Jen (Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, World and Town)
- Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid)
- Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island)
- Joyce Carol Oates (them, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, Sourland)
- Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, The Idea of Justice)
- Stacy Schiff (Vera, A Great Improvisation, Cleopatra: A Life)
- Joseph Stiglitz (Freefall, Making Globalization Work)
- Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
- Edward O. Wilson (The Ants, The Naturalist, Anthill)
- Kevin Young (Jelly Roll: A Blues, For the Confederate Dead, The Art of Losing)
A complete list of authors, as well as author bios, will be available later in the summer at www.bostonbookfest.org. The complete program of events, including times and Copley Square locations, will be announced after Labor Day. All daytime events will be free.
The inaugural festival, held in October of 2009, was an unequivocal success. Organizers estimate that 12,000 people attended the presentations, panel discussions, workshops, music performances and street fair, most of which were free. The event featured 90 authors and presenters, including some of the biggest names in the literary world, 40 outdoor exhibitors, 30 indoor events, children’s activities, and live music. Internationally-known fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, critics and commentators spoke to packed houses at historic Boston locations.