Book lovers will gather in Concord for New Hampshire’s first statewide book festival this Saturday.
The event will host over 50 authors and is free to the public, with panels, book signings, family activities and more. Keynote events begin Friday.
Emilie Christie Burack is the co-founder and President of the New Hampshire Book Festival. She’s also an author herself. Burack joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about the festival this weekend.
NHPR is a media partner for the New Hampshire Book Festival.
Transcript
Say I'm a first time book festival goer. Can you describe the scene for us? What happens at a book festival?
A book festival is just a joyful gathering of readers and authors. What we are doing in our book festival, because each one is a little different, we are inviting adult and children's authors to come to Concord. They're going to be on panels all day, which are free and open to the public, talking to readers about their new books [and] all of their books are books that come out in 2024. They'll be talking about everything from their process to just answering general questions or just talking among themselves up on a stage.
So there'll be opportunities for real face to face time with these authors.
Absolutely. That's the joy of a book festival. It's face to face with the authors, but it's face to face with the people around you that also just love a good book, love a good story, and really like to talk about what they've read.
There are people that travel all over the country, going from book festival to book festival. So there are book festival groupies. And then people that just walked up because they had no idea what was going on and wanted to find out. It's a real community kind of event.
So this is the first statewide book festival here in New Hampshire. How did this whole thing come together?
So New Hampshire has so many readers and writers. There have been authors coming to libraries or groups of authors coming and presenting, but there hasn't been one that's just celebrating readers and authors on a really broad base.
And so Sarah McCraw Crow, who's my co-founder, she and I are both authors and we've been talking for years about how Concord is the perfect place for a book festival. One, we have this amazing independent bookstore, and you always need a bookstore to get the inventory in and to have the books available for a festival. It's a huge part. And then we have the Capitol Center for the Arts just across the street. We kept thinking, this would be great, because we could have all of our authors in one area and close off the streets. Finally I just said, ‘Well, no one's going to do it, why don't we just do it?’ And so Sara said, yes, and then we got an incredible board of volunteers behind us, and it just went from there.
So more than 50 authors will be at the festival this weekend. But of course there's so many [authors] out there. How did you decide on the lineup?
We wanted to bring into New Hampshire people that maybe most residents wouldn't ever have an opportunity to meet in person. So we have New Hampshire authors, but also authors from California and Canada and all over coming in.
For most book festivals, you're looking at who would be the best authors to come in, what is the quality of their story, what is it all about and how does it fit together in a panel that makes sense, [and] that would be really fun for readers. So ‘Magic, Myths and Quests’ is one of our panels. There are also debut authors. There are graphic novelists [and]there are author illustrators. There are people from all different genres that we're putting together in panels. But the way we made those choices was really just [thinking about] what books we thought the community would really want.
We’re a first-time book festival. So we thought, is anyone going to apply? And we were overwhelmed with applications from really top authors around the country. So we had a lot of hard choices to make.
