BBF 2017: Where We Find Ourselves
The theme for this year’s Boston Book Festival is “Where We Find Ourselves.” The theme speaks in part to our political moment, to how we arrived at this strange and often disconcerting place in history and what we can collectively and individually do next. Sessions like “Politics” with Maureen Dowd and Jared Yates Sexton, “Geopolitics” with Graham Allison, Meghan O’Sullivan, and Nick Burns, and “Racism in America” with Carol Anderson, Chris Hayes, and James Forman Jr. address these questions directly, while sessions like M. T. Anderson’s YA Keynote and and “#LookItUP: Knowledge Matters” with Brian Halley, Marilynn Johnson, and Tom Nichols explore them more implicitly.
Ideas of travel, migration, and home also surface throughout our sessions, featuring works of both fiction and nonfiction, as authors explore the literal places we reside in or journey through. “This Is the Place” explores women’s writings about home, while “Arrivals and Departures” features Adam Gopnik and Kristen Radtke’s memoirs about inhabiting, and traveling through, unfamiliar places. In “Strangers in a Strange Land,” three fiction writers—Jonny Sun, Lisa Ko, and Hala Alyan—probe questions of migration and rootlessness. And in “Voices of America,” writers Ha Jin and Grace Talusan as well as publisher Ilan Stavans examine how writers address the immigrant experience.
Of course, in addition to these and other thematically linked sessions, we have dozens of other eclectic events and activities designed to appeal to all sorts of readers. Sessions on food, suspense novels, and the Beatles, as well as plenty of programs for teens and younger readers, remind us that there’s nothing wrong with finding a little fun in our reading, too. We have more BBF Unbound and Reading Like a Writer sessions than ever before (including one on poetry), and we’re pleased to be hosting a full slate of readings in fiction, memoir, and essays at the BPL’s new Newsfeed Café—a great spot for book clubs to grab a cup of coffee and a bite to eat while getting inspiration for their reading choices in the coming year.
We’re pleased to partner with Boston’s first-in-the-nation Literary District, which is presenting its second annual Lit Crawl in Back Bay on the Thursday before the BBF. You’ll find the full schedule of their Lit Crawl events on our website as well—it’s the perfect way to kick off the BBF festivities!
This year every single event at the BBF—including Lit Crawl—is absolutely free, and tickets are not required to attend any session. If you’re still familiarizing yourself with our new interactive schedule, you might want to refer to this tutorial blog post from last year. Our mobile app will soon be updated for 2017 as well. Enjoy getting to know our schedule and planning your BBF day—in the meantime, we’ll be busy behind the scenes getting ready to welcome nearly 250 authors—and you!—to Copley Square in just a few short weeks. For all of us who find ourselves through books and literature, it’s sure to be a memorable weekend.
