Hello readers! It’s Jessica from Team BBF, here to guide you through our schedule for the 2021 Boston Book Festival.

As you’ve probably experienced from past Boston Book Festivals, the sheer number of sessions is like a literary feast set out for hungry readers (the last in-person Festival we hosted had over 150 sessions!). But you’ve also probably felt that panic of “What do I choose?” when you open up that two-page multi-colored spread of sessions in the program guide. (I know I have!)

Because that schedule can be a bit daunting, even in a virtual year, we’re here to help you find the sessions you want to attend so you can see a favorite author, learn something new, think about the world around you in different ways, or discover some new reads for your TBR pile. And because the majority of our sessions will be virtual this year, you don’t need to worry about sprinting down Boylston Street or Washington Street to get to the next session (being sure to grab a grilled cheese on the way). Let’s get started!

Young Adult Sessions for 2021

YA literature has grown into a category that’s not just entertaining for teens and adults alike, but that has served as the vehicle for authors to explore deeper topics of identity, belonging, relationships, societal injustices, and more. This year we’re highlighting some of those topics in our YA sessions, which range from new takes on old tales (Classics Remixed), how to act in a time of unrest (Revolution and Resistance Then and Now), a memoir of growing up Black and queer (Memoir Keynote), and new takes on nature writing (This Session’s for the Birds). We also have a session featuring the intergenerational work of a family of writers (Lifelong Learning Keynote). Teens will also have the chance to connect with other teens and learn about the arts and activist history of Nubian Square as well.

Here’s your guide to our YA sessions.

 

Lifelong Learning Keynote

Tamara Payne, with hosts Jurianny Guerrero and Kellie Carter Jackson

Saturday, October 16 at 5:00pm | Virtual

This session is for readers interested in…: The life of Malcolm X, but also how biography is researched and written.

What you’ll find in this session: A conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Tamara Payne, who, after her father passed away, stepped in to finish his exhaustive biography of Malcolm X, already decades in the works. She’ll be in conversation with Wellesley College professor Kellie Carter Jackson and Fenway High School senior Jurianny Guerrero.

What you’ll take away from it: The depths of research it takes to compile a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, as well as one family’s ongoing work to do just that.

Session is sponsored by the Eric and Jane Nord Family Fund.

REGISTER

 

YA: Classics Remixed

C.B. Lee and Bethany C. Morrow, with host Laura Berestecki

Monday, October 18 at 5:30pm | Virtual (prerecorded)

This session is for readers interested in…: Discovering more YA authors who are reinterpreting classics through new cultural lenses and fresh takes.

What you’ll find in this session: How authors C.B. Lee and Bethany C. Morrow remixed their source material—one a queer retelling of Treasure Island, the other a retelling of Little Women centered on formerly enslaved Black people—to bring more culturally relevant and diverse takes on classic literature. They’ll be in conversation with BPL’s YA librarian Laura Berestecki.

What you’ll take away from it: Reimagining classics, myths, and fairy tales is hot (BookTok hot) these days, and you can hear how authors are crafting and rethinking these old stories for new audiences.

Session is sponsored by Simmons University.

REGISTER

 

YA: This Session’s for the Birds

Derrick Z. Jackson, Stephen Kress, and Rosemary Mosco, with host Jeremy Spool

Wednesday, October 20 at 4:00pm | Virtual (prerecorded)

This session is for readers interested in…: Learning more about the natural world, and getting to know some feathery friends a bit better.

What you’ll find in this session: Pigeons and puffins will be the focus, as Rosemary Mosco gives us a rundown of the quirks and fun facts about pigeons, while ornithologist Stephen W. Kress and photographer Derrick Z. Jackson will tell the story of repopulating puffins in Maine. They’ll be in conversation with Jeremy Spool of the Massachusetts Young Birders Club.

What you’ll take away from it: Find out some fun facts about familiar and not so familiar birds, as well as hear from nature writers on their craft.

REGISTER

 

YA: Revolution and Resistance Then and Now

Kekla Magoon, Jamia Wilson, Crystal M. Fleming, and De Nichols, with host Carissa Romain

Thursday, October 21 at 4:00pm | Virtual (prerecorded)

This session is for readers interested in…: Learning about the history of activism, and finding out how to engage in the present moment.

What you’ll find in this session: Four authors—National Book Award finalist Kekla Magoon, Jamia Wilson, Crystal M. Fleming, and De Nichols—will discuss protest and activist movements, from a history of the Black Panthers and the feminist movement, to how young people can take action to speak up and fight injustice today. They’ll be in conversation with Carissa Romain.

What you’ll take away from it: More context around our present moment of protest, and actions to take to combat injustice today.

Sessions is sponsored by Candlewick Press.

REGISTER

 

BPL Roxbury Branch Reopening: BBF Unbound BEAT Tour

METCO

Saturday, October 23 at 1:00pm | In Person

This session is for readers interested in…: Discovering more about Nubian Square’s activist and arts history from METCO students on an in-person tour.

What you’ll find in this session: Attendees will be introduced to Nubian Square’s history and its many organizers and civil rights workers as they participate in the Boston Education Activism Tour (BEAT) tour, led by high school students in the METCO program.

What you’ll take away from it: New insights into our local history, and inspiration on taking action to make the world a better place today.

 

YA: Memoir Keynote

George M. Johnson, with host Nicholl Montgomery

Saturday, October 23 at 2:30pm | Virtual

This session is for readers interested in…: Hearing from the author of All Boys Aren’t Blue on their newest memoir.

What you’ll find in this session: George M. Johnson’s new memoir We Are Not Broken tells the story of their growing up as a queer Black boy, their relationship with their three siblings, and the fiercely loving grandmother that raised them. Johnson will be in conversation with children’s literature professor Nicholl Montgomery.

What you’ll take away from it: Inspiration in hearing the story of a queer Black author’s childhood, and the foundational love and support found there.

Session is sponsored by Simmons University.

REGISTER

 

 

I hope this guide has helped you get a glimpse into the vast array of writers and what they’re working on who will join us for the 2021 Boston Book Festival. Head to the main schedule to browse all sessions and for registration links, and we’ll see you there!

 

How does a writer respond to events as heavy and impacting as those of these past two years? A global pandemic and the disruption of health, business, and societal connections as we knew them, as well as grassroots movements fighting for the end of systemic racism, a political race with the future of our nation at stake, all against the backdrop of an impending climate crisis.

Everyone lived it. But writers and artists also have the added task of making sense of the world around them, creating meaning from chaos, and finding the humanity, connection, and truth at the core of our shared existence.

That’s what our 2021 Boston Book Festival headliners are seeking to do in their work: make meaning of recent events, or look at history through the lens of new ideas, insights, or identities, or interrogate big themes through fiction, satire, or genre, or simply find the human connection between all of us.

Here are some of the common themes found in our headliners’ work, and how they are fulfilling the Boston Book Festival’s mission by using “the power of words to stimulate, agitate, unite, delight, and inspire.”

Analyzing the Societal Impact of COVID

The Boston Book Festival kick-off keynote session will feature Nicholas A. Christakis, whose book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live not only details the COVID-19 pandemic, but seeks to understand its impact on human society. A sociologist and physician whose research focuses on both the social and biological ways people form connections, Christakis asks what it means to live during a pandemic—something few of us have done across history.

Joining Christakis will be Sandro Galea, whose new book The Contagion Next Time looks at how to combat new epidemics, and how it will involve a commitment to—and perhaps a reimagining of—public health that starts with addressing systemic poverty in order to create a more equitable, just, and healthy society.

The Past Informs the Present

The theme of using history to inform our current time continues with headliners who seek to address the racial unrest in our country and examine how its roots in the past continue to branch into the present.

Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed’s book On Juneteenth details the events leading up June 19, 1865, the date that marks the end of legalized slavery in America, a history that informed the long-awaited creation of Juneteenth as a national holiday this past year. The long shadow of the Civil War is also the topic of Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award), which examines the sites where monuments and landmarks keep slavery alive, and the stories they tell—or don’t tell. Kekla Magoon looks to history to inform the present moment as well in Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People (longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for young people’s literature), a history of the Black Panther Party and Black community activism, tracing a line to the Black Lives Matter movement today. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning biography The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, completed by Tamara Payne after the death of her journalist father Les Payne, seeks to put Malcolm X within the context of history: his upbringing, his family’s beliefs, and the systemic racism that still continues. Former Poet Laureate of the U.S. Tracy K. Smith also explores the impact of history in her new collection Such Color: New and Selected Poems, asking questions of America’s history of racism and pushing back against the shadows of the past.

Family, Community, and Connection

Our headliners are also looking to the past to inform their present, but on a much more micro scale, investigating family history—whether their own or someone else’s—and the community around them to make sense of their personal history, identity, and connection.

George M. Johnson’s new memoir We Are Not Broken seeks to tell their own story of Black boyhood, growing up with three brothers and the grandmother that raised them, and to use that story to demonstrate the connections of family and how they inform the adults we become. In All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award), Tiya Miles also seeks to uncover family connections—literally—as she researches a mother and daughter parted in the slave trade in 1852, and the objects that linked them and their descents. Author Tricia Elam Walker and artist Ekua Holmes looked to the past—their childhood in Roxbury—to create the picture book Dream Street, about the everyday people that live in a community and the importance of the connections between them.

Action Today for a Better Future

Our headliners also look at the events and culture around us and anticipate the future—and ask how we should respond.

In his collection of graphic essays Save It for Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest, Nate Powell interrogates the idea of what it means to be a parent in our current age of protest and unrest and in what ways he should prepare his children for future activism. Anita Diamant investigates the state of people who menstruate worldwide in Period. End of Sentence. A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice and uses stories, anecdotes, and historical fact to encourage normalization of the conversation and ongoing action against menstrual injustice. In Imagine It!: A Handbook for a Happier Planet, Laurie David provides an actionable guidebook for those wanting to reduce their footprint and adopt more sustainable living habits to help combat the increasing threat of climate change.

Race in the (Fictional) Workplace

Unlike historians or reporters, fiction writers have the freedom to use crafted characters and literary tools like metaphor, satire, and analogy to explore timely truths—and two of our fiction headliners are doing just that.

The novel Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour takes a satirical look at workplace culture in America through a main character who is a mysterious company’s only Black salesman, and his witty commentary on the inherent racism of startup culture. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s novel The Other Black Girl follows the only Black editorial assistant at a prestigious white publishing house—and her reaction to the second Black employee that arrives—and provides a commentary on the lack of Black representation in publishing through the guise of a thriller.

Leveraging Genre Fiction to Imagine and Subvert

Authors have long used genre to explore questions of race, justice, equality, identity, and other topics that mainstream or literary fiction doesn’t give the latitude to explore. Two of our headliners are using genre as their medium through which to explore the world around us.

Alyssa Cole’s romance novel How to Find a Princess is rife with the elements of a good rom-com—a secret past, a fake marriage, a high-seas journey—yet those tropes are the vehicle for a queer retelling of the story of Anastasia as well as the inclusion of neurodivergent characters. In the speculative fiction novel The Freedom Race, Lucinda Roy imagines what an America that has reinstituted slavery after a second Civil War would look like and how emancipation can come by competing against others in a race to freedom.

Join the BBF Headliners October 16-23

So how does a writer respond to the world around them, and create art not just from the events and unrest of the current moment, but from the connections between them and others, and from their own understanding of themselves and their identity? Find out at the Boston Book Festival, held virtually on October 16-23. Look for our headliner session list to be released soon.

The Boston Book Festival team was excited to sit down with Alexis Ivy, one of many presenters on this year’s exciting Lit Crawl lineup. Alexis’s session, entitled “Conversations with Art: Ekphrastic Writing in Graffiti Alley,” will be an opportunity for audiences to converse with their immediate surroundings through ekphrasis, a writing style focused on descriptions of art. Below, see some of Alexis’s thoughts on the creative process and how Boston as a community influences work across mediums. And snag one of just a few spots left for this free workshop on June 10th by signing up here.

BBF: What can audiences look forward to from your session at Lit Crawl?

Alexis Ivy: Writers will have the chance to be playful with language and selfhood.

BBF: How is writing poetry specifically inspired by art different from other writing endeavors?

AI: Ekphrastic poetry lets writers go to places they hadn’t thought of. Whether a translation or inspiration, art allows a writer to work in the form of persona. The exercise of ekphrasis brings unfamiliar and surprising language to the page by its ever-changing perspectives of looking at a piece of art. Art adds a creative complication to the writing making your words wondrously more dynamic and unique.

BBF: How has the past year influenced or informed your writing style or your artistic focus?

AI: I have learned I need to be away from home in order to focus on my manuscript. Since life has been all homelife, home has taken on a different definition for me as a writer. It has stopped being a refuge for me as a writer. My focus hasn’t changed as much as my artistic space.

BBF: Being Boston-born, what is your favorite aspect of the Boston-area community?

AI: Writers celebrate the literary history of our streets. The art of words is a wonderful call to action. Whether it’s poetry on the T, sidewalk poetry, public readings, library branch workshops—this city’s collaboration of writers make sure everyone’s words are seen, spoken, heard.

Sign up for this workshop at at Lit Crawl 2021!

 

This year, the Boston Book Festival’s annual Lit Crawl will mark an exciting return to in-person events for the Boston literary community. We had the opportunity to sit down with author Kim Adrian. Kim will be hosting her session, “The Art of (Writing About) Reading,” as a way to introduce audiences to the art of the bibliomemoir. Register here for this session on June 10 at Lit Crawl 2021!

BBF: What can audiences unfamiliar with bibliomemoir look forward to from your session at Lit Crawl?

Kim: The audience will hear from four practitioners of the genre—four writers with four different approaches to combining literary analysis with memoir. One of the readers, Adam Colman (New Uses for Failure) has described bibliomemoir as “a genre that eats other genres.” This is usually the thing that people get most excited about when they learn about this type of writing. For example, Kim McLarin’s bibliomemoir about James Baldwin’s novel Another Country combines a critical examination of the work with personal reflections on how Baldwin (and many other Black American writers) helped turn her into the woman and the writer she is today. At the same time, there’s a hefty strand of cultural criticism running throughout the whole thing, so the text feels very densely woven: personal, political-cultural, and literary all at once. Bibliomemoir encourages multifaceted or multivalent writing like this because you’ve always got at least two things going on: the writer writing reflectively on a personal experience (reading a book), and, at the same time, the writer examining why that book is (or perhaps is not) successful. For those comfortable working in this way it’s very tempting to add a third and perhaps even a fourth element into the mix.

BBF: How does “removing the glaze of pretension” influence the process of interpreting works of literature, either in general or in your specific experience?

Kim: With the phrase “removing the glaze of pretension” I mean getting out of the kind of faux-objective critical mode of passing judgement, speaking from on high, from a position of authority, which is the attitude most people associate with literary criticism, art criticism, criticism in general. That attitude implies that a work of art exists as an objective thing in the world, and that, as an objective thing, it requires a special kind of sensibility, a specially trained intellect, to be correctly perceived and interpreted. But a work of art does not exist in a vacuum. It is not a stable, immutable entity. In fact, there are as many ways to experience, for example, a great novel as there are readers of that novel, which is another way of saying that the novel itself changes for each reader. This is the premise on which bibliomemoir is based. The genre embraces the messiness of literature, the dynamism involved in the act of reading. That said, a good bibliomemoir will always take the act of criticism very seriously. But by its very nature bibliomemoir rejects the idea of critic-as-authortative-taste-maker, or critic-as-judge, and embraces, instead, criticism as a kind of creative, generative activity. 

BBF: How do you think Boston, as a community or location, can contribute to the tradition of bibliomemoir? What aspects of the city do you think enrich literary criticism?

Kim: Bibliomemoir seems to be a growing genre right now. Much like microhistory, bibliomemoir upends a specific, traditional cultural structure—in this case the kind of authoritative perspective (rooted in entrenched power structures) that conventional criticism upholds. In this sense, it is an inherently political genre—a liberal or democratic genre. Boston is a left-leaning city that just so happens to be packed with great readers. If bibliomemor, as a genre, has a shot at finding a solid foothold with a hungry audience, Boston readers could well be the ones to make that happen.

BBF: How has the past year influenced your work, if at all?

Kim: It’s been a freaky year for me, of course. I’m no exception to that rule. COVID affected the launch of my bibliomemoir, Dear Knausgaard, pushing off the launch date by several months and putting events online. But it also nudged me into a new direction in my writing. For one thing, it got me thinking about magical thinking, simply because there was so much of that going on, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. Thinking about magical thinking got me thinking about imagination in general, so that I now find myself doing a lot of research on that topic. Beyond that, the further growth of the Black Lives Matter movement has affected everything—the whole way I see history, power, beauty, truth, language, perspective, my country, and my own existence within my own white skin, in ways I’m still trying to process and will continue to process, I’m sure, for years to come. Ditto the recent and ongoing challenges to our democracy (which have circled me back around to the concept of magical thinking and imagination). Long story short, I’m still very much trying to process the past year. My hope is to be able to write about some of the strangeness and change that we’ve been going through in my current project—which happens to be another bibliomemoir, this time about the life and work of the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann.

We’re looking forward to hearing more from Kim and all of our other Lit Crawl presenters on June 10 in Cambridge!  “The Art of (Writing About) Reading” will take place at 7:00 PM at Dial Restaurant in Cambridge. For more information about Lit Crawl and to register, see the BBF website.