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.
The Boston Book Festival recently announced One City, One Story, a new initiative made possible with support from the Goldhirsh Foundation. The Boston Book Festival will publish a short story by a well- known local writer, which will be distributed as a bound booklet to 30,000 Bostonians, free of charge. It will also be available for download to anyone at www.bostonbookfest.org. Festival organizers are finalizing their choice of writer, and his or her name will be announced sometime this summer. Distribution will take place at Boston Public Library branches, subway stations and other places where people gather, in October, in advance of the Boston Book Festival. Complete details about distribution times and locations will be available after Labor Day.
Boston Book Festival sponsors include Liberty Mutual, The Boston Foundation, The Goldhirsh Foundation, Other Press, Hotel Commonwealth, The Plymouth Rock Foundation, Hachette Book Group, Bank of America, and The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Media sponsors include WBUR, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, New England Cable News, WBZ NewsRadio 1030, Mix 104.1, 103.3 WODS, WGBH, The Times Literary Supplement (of London) and The Boston Parents Paper.
Boston Book Festival Partners include Mayor Thomas M. Menino; The Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events; The City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department; ReadBoston; ArtsBoston; Mass Poetry Festival; ArtFuse; Boston Public Library; the Boston Athenæum; PEN New England; Grub Street; Trinity Church; Old South Church; Boston Children’s Museum; Cambridge Public Library, New Center for Arts and Culture; 826 Boston; Brattle Theatre, Berklee College of Music; Emerson College.
For more information about the Boston Book Festival, visit www.bostonbookfest.org.