For staffers here at the Network, the second Saturday in September marks the unnofficial beginning of Fall.
For years now, we’ve had a booth at Bookmarks Festival of Books & Authors. Memories abound. There was the afternoon tempest that washed away all the exhibitor booths several years ago. There was blinding heat, last year, which sent exhibitors cowering beneath the shade of our tents like vampires afraid of the sun.
There have also been amazing talks by Lev Grossman, Robert Morgan, Jason Mott, and many, many more. And it’s a relaxed way to catch up at length with old friends.
Rain or shine, Bookmarks Festival of Books & Authors always turns out to be one of the most fun days of the year.
The 2017 festival happens September 7-10. Saturday, September 9, offers a free, all-day event outside the Rhodes Center for the Arts in Downtown Winston-Salem.
Our Executive Director, Ed Southern, will moderate two Slush Pile Live! panels, at 10:00 am and 4:00 pm on the Downtown Stage, with esteemed editors Steven Kirk (formerly of John F. Blair, Publisher), Robin Miura (Carolina Wren Press), and Julia Smith (Bull City Press). Slush Pile Live! lets editors respond to anonymous submissions read out loud, as if they had come across the submission in an slush pile. (We host something similar every year at our Spring Conference.) Always a rolickin’ good time!
At 12:15 pm in the Calvary Moravian Sanctuary, Ed will moderate a panel celebrating fifty years of the North Carolina Arts Council, featuring North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductees Allan Gurganus and Jaki Shelton Green, and bestselling author Jill McCorkle.
Other highlights include:
- A Flash Fiction Workshop with Greensboro author Steve Cushman at 1:30 pm on the second floor of the Rhodes Center (free, but registration required)
- A “Fictional Retellings” panel at 10:45 am in the Rhodes Center with friends of the Network John Claude Bemis, Charlie Lovett, and Stephanie Powell Watts
- North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame inductee Margaret Maron in the Calvary Moravian Sanctuary at 3:45 pm
- And a whole lot more!
For the complete schedule, click here.
The Network will have a booth—Booth 29, to be exact, along Spruce Street. We’d love to chat with you. If you’re around in the morning, be sure to stop by and introduce yourself to our new membership coordinator, Deonna Kelli Sayed!
For more information about Bookmarks Festival of Books & Authors, click here.