Tag: Mid-South Book Festival

Categories
Book Features Books

Mid-South Book Festival gathers book lovers and writers.

It’s that time of year again, book lovers. Time to climb off the sofa, turn off your reading lamp, put down your cheaters, and slip from the cozy warmth of your favorite coffee shop. But don’t leave your books behind. Bring them with you to the Mid-South Book Festival.

This year’s festival takes place over five days beginning Wednesday, September 7th and should be every bit as exciting as last year’s, an affair that saw 80 authors and nearly 5,000 attendees. It was a great showing for an event in only its second year of existence.

For this, its third year, there are close to 100 authors and speakers, including Phyllis Dixon (Down Home Blues), book editor George Hodgman, Joshua Hood (Warning Order), and Ed Tarkington (Only Love Can Break Your Heart). Sure to attract a large audience is Lauren Groff, author of the wildly popular novel Fates and Furies, a finalist for the National Book Award and Amazon’s pick for Best Book of the Year. She’ll be in conversation with author and festival chair Courtney Miller Santo Saturday at 2:30 p.m. on the main stage at Playhouse on the Square.

Lauren Groff

In addition to Groff, one of the panels Santo is most excited about is Making Memphis, which includes writers with a local connection who work in the genres of poetry, nonfiction, thrillers, and speculative fiction. “One of the themes the committee and I talked about was really being more inclusive in the types of writers and genre of writers that are coming, and acknowledging that people read for all kinds of reasons and it’d be best to really be broad in bringing people in,” Santo said. “We have one of the premier editors of science fiction, Sheree Thomas. We have a couple of poets on the panel as well as Josh Hood, who writes military thrillers. I’m always saying that Memphis is a storyteller’s town. I’m very excited to see people come together and talk about storytelling.”

Saturday is full of panel discussions at Playhouse on the Square and across the street at Circuit Playhouse. These include: The Word (Memphis’ longest-running open mic event that features a live band), Echoes of History (three writers discuss their stories of war and why they wrote them), Crowd Control (influential bloggers discuss how to stand out among the online crowd), and Impossible Language (selections from the ongoing poetry reading series), among many others.

Prior to Saturday, Literacy Summit 2016 will be held on Wednesday, September 7th. Literacy Mid-South is in the business of improving people’s lives through improving literacy rates, and the summit brings together “nonprofit and government agencies, community advocates, volunteers, and parents to network, develop new skills, and share promising practices.” The featured speaker will be Yolie Flores with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. There is a $10 registration fee for this event.

Friday night, in the Event Room at Playhouse, will be Words Matter, a collaboration that begins with a literary contribution from a writer before a team of artists and performers molds those words into their own creation. Visual artists, musicians, dancers, actors, and filmmakers express their creativity through the author’s language. Tickets for this event are $25 in advance and $40 at the door.

Sunday sees the inaugural Student Writers Conference, meant to help young writers age 12 to 17 grow and succeed in their craft. Registration fee is $10 with scholarships available as needed.

This year’s festivities promise to outshine those before it, and the future of the festival is bright. Santo talks of spinning it into its own nonprofit and hosting an even greater diversity of presenters and attendees. “We’d like to keep it open and inclusive, and we’re talking to our community about what it’s needing,” she said. “My craving with being an author is to have good stories to tell, and that’s the center of the Mid-South and Memphis for me — the idea of storytelling.”

Categories
Book Features Books

The Mid-South Book Festival overcomes the odds

For the number of problems Memphis is said to have, we don’t deserve the arts scene that we have.” So said Dan Conaway, public relations stalwart, city bard, and a cousin of mine. We were talking among a group of writers at the recent Well Read Reception, the party to kick off what, by all accounts, was a rousingly successful Mid-South Book Festival. Put on by Literacy Mid-South, an organization whose mission it is to stamp out illiteracy in our area, the weekend welcomed 80 authors and 5,000 attendees.

And despite those problems, the arts scene and community in Memphis continues to thrive. And not just thrive, but become accessible to people of all walks of life. The book festival was free, and there were activities for kids, books given away, and workshops for wannabe writers. What Literacy Mid-South executive director Kevin Dean has done is bring a community of readers and writers together. With 120,000 adults reading below a sixth-grade level, Dean says, “the time is now to begin to actively engage the community and provide more access to the literary arts.”

While a festival won’t eradicate such problems, it does wonders to lift the human spirit. With such a turnout this year, there’s no telling what next year might bring.

And speaking of community . . .

Author and chair of the English department at Morehead State University in Kentucky, Tom Williams, released a collection of short stories last August. Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales (Texas Review Press) is, at its soul, a search for identity and the community that might go along with the discovery. Williams, the son of an African-American father and white mother, writes in “Who Among Us Knows the Route To Heaven?,” “For I’d already determined that someone like me was always treading a narrow and treacherous path — not unlike the tightropes stretched over Niagara Falls, with jagged rocks to one side, angry, churning water to the other.” Those rocks and that water would be the children the character had grown up with, those who demanded he live up to the ideals of whichever race he chose to identify as.

Williams was raised in central Ohio and said recently by phone, “I felt like there was an urge on my point to belong, and I could do that to an extent, but not fully, or not completely. I felt like if I’d said, ‘I’m one with y’all,’ there’s a lot of people that would’ve said, ‘Well, not quite.'”

In “The Hotel Joseph Conrad,” the community isn’t racial, but professional, as the protagonist, Maurice, a writer on assignment, searches high and low for a hotel by that name. What he finds is a fraternity in the search itself, and a common bond with writers the world over.

In the title story, “Among the Wild Mulattos,” the main character is a biracial anthropology professor who hears of a community of mulattos living in the Arkansas Delta. He sets out on a quest to find them and, when he does, is assimilated into their fold. He learns that, just because it’s a community of like-minded, like-skinned people, a utopia it is not. This story brings the reader to Memphis, part of the outside world the members call “Two-Box” (“as in the two boxes one had to choose from on applications and the like: ‘White’ or ‘Black.'”). He even teaches the secluded, teenage boys about the Grizzlies.

Williams knows a thing or two about Memphis. He worked in Jonesboro, Arkansas, for a time, and he and his wife visited at least once a month. “Every time I visited there, there’s something that just puts me in a state of awe somehow,” he said. “There’s a kind of historical reverence that I feel there when I think of all the things that happened, there’s a certain literary reverence because Richard Wright passed through there, Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Mid-South Book Festival

“Everything is going so according to plan that it’s unsettling,” says Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, the local agency that’s been working hard on the first-ever Mid-South Book Festival. Beginning this Thursday at Crosstown Arts and continuing into Sunday, events will also be held at the Memphis Botanic Garden, Burke’s Book Store, the Booksellers at Laurelwood, and the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center.

The Mid-South Book Festival has dozens of writers scheduled and more than 50 free events planned, including panel discussions, author presentations, author readings, book signings, writing seminars, and sessions for aspiring writers, plus events designed especially for kids. It’s a festival, Dean says, whose time has come:

“The simple truth is that Memphis has needed not only a book festival but an ongoing sense of community for writers, book lovers, bloggers, and lifelong learners. The only way to make an event like this happen is to have support from the community. Without our committee, our sponsors, the volunteers, and the authors, we could never have possibly put this on. The support has been fantastic.”

Sept. 25th -28th

So, everything is set. The authors are ready. And according to Dean, who was contacted last week about final preparations, the tasks ahead were simple: printing programs, updating the schedule, etc. — in his words, “minor stuff.”

But it’s not too early to be thinking ahead. Asked if there were plans in the works for next year’s festival, Dean was already enthusiastic:

“YES! I’m so excited, but I can’t tell you about it yet. We’ll announce the location for the 2015 Mid-South Book Festival the week after this year’s festival. We’ve already signed the contract for the location. And it’s going to be awesome.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Mid-South Book Festival Booked For September

This may be the first week of July, but the last weekend of September is on the minds of the folks at Literacy Mid-South. That’s because planning is very much in the works (and has been for months now) for the organization’s first-ever, citywide, and mostly free Mid-South Book Festival September 25th-28th. Dozens of authors, panelists, speakers, and workshop leaders — the majority of them Memphians or Mid-Southerners — are set to appear. Multiple venues have agreed to serve as event sites, and sponsors are in place. So too festival apps, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account.

For a list of participating writers, events, venues, and updates, go to midsouthbookfest.org. Among the invited writers are Memphis Flyer Associate Editor (and cookbook author) Bianca Phillips and Flyer photographer Justin Fox Burks (cookbook co-author along with his wife, Amy Lawrence). Other Memphians slated to be on hand: Steve Bradshaw, Jennifer Chandler, Heather Dobbins, Robert Gordon, Aram Goudsouzian, Mark Greaney, Lisa Hickman, Corey Mesler, Lisa Patton, Courtney Miller Santo, and Barry Wolverton. But there are out-of-towners scheduled to appear too, among them: Julia Reed, Scott Heim, and Michael Lowenthal.

Dean, Heather Nordtvedt (Literacy Mid-South’s community relations manager), and the organization’s staff have been working hard since the idea for a book festival was raised at a board meeting last summer.

“Nobody thought it was going to happen anytime soon,” Dean admitted. “The festival was simply in our five-year plan — a signature event, not just a fund-raiser. Then our fall reading campaign fell through for this year, so we thought we’d try out the book festival idea. It was going to be a small thing. We thought: Let’s try it and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll get rid of it.”

And indeed, the festival began small: a one-day event at the Memphis Botanic Garden. It’s now expanded to four days — with programs for children and young adults and live-music components — and the venues so far include, in addition to the Botanic Garden, the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Burke’s Book Store, and the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center.

What prompted the expansion? Immediate and enthusiastic local author interest, for one thing. Public response, for another. According to Dean, when the festival launched its Facebook page, the site received 250 “likes” the first day.

Early in the planning stages, Literacy Mid-South was thinking maybe a couple hundred people would show up for the festival. The organization is now expecting thousands. Which all goes to show, Dean is convinced, that Memphians have been looking for such a festival in their own town. Nashville has its Southern Festival of Books. Little Rock has its Arkansas Literary Festival.

It was at the festival in Little Rock this past April that Dean talked to author Mary Roach, who’s no stranger to the book-festival circuit. Dean told Roach of Literacy Mid-South’s plans. She immediately convinced him that the Mid-South Book Festival needed to expand beyond a single day and single venue — and the better to meet one of the festival’s goals: funding local literacy programs. Proceeds from Literacy Mid-South’s onsite Bookworm store, concessions, and three creative-writing workshops during the festival will go to supporting those programs.

“I’m a big proponent of growing things — starting small, then growing,” Dean said of the festival.

But growing this fast? Dean has just hired someone to manage the festival for the next couple of years. And there’s been talk about doing some publishing at Literacy Mid-South: a collection of writings by festival authors about Memphis.

“This all shows a need that we’re filling, even among people who don’t necessarily know what a book festival is,” Dean said of the Mid-South Book Festival. “And what’s crazy: We have all these best-selling authors in Memphis, and I didn’t even know they live here! Putting the festival together has been educational for me too.”

But as planning the festival reaches its final stages, Dean had this to add: “Everything’s nailed down. Now it just has to happen.”

midsouthbookfest.org; facebook.com/midsouthbookfest; @MSouthBookFest