The Boston Book Festival, October 23–25, 2014

by Chris Hartman, Project Manager

Founded by Deborah Z. Porter in 2009, the Boston Book Festival (BBF) enters its sixth year as an important event for book enthusiasts in New England. For three fall days in late October—Thursday the 23rd through Saturday 25th, to be precise—Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood will be descended upon by literati and over 20,000 of their ardent readers, who vie to attend panel discussions where they have a chance to hear the thoughts and opinions of their favorite writers and cultural personalities.

Though much of the BBF has traditionally had a New England focus, hosting authors with local connections such as Dennis Lehane, Steve Almond, Susan Minot and Richard Russo, it has also featured more general panel discussions in a variety of genres and disciplines, such as architecture, education, politics, technology, fiction, memoir and sports writing. This year, there will be between 150 and 200 presenters, blanketing Boston’s Copley Square in a variety of venues, both large and small. Complementing its impressive roster of former and current presenters, the BBF has also hosted a number of Nobel laureates, including the 2006 winner in literature, Orhan Pamuk, and neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, MD.

This year, the BBF will explore a diverse range of topics that have event descriptions such as “Africa: Looking on the Bright Side,” “Technology: Promise and Peril,” “Childhood Treasures: The Role of Illustration in Children’s Literature,” and “Memoir: Journeys Home and Abroad.” Highlighting the latter, a Thursday night keynote speech about his memoir, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, will be given by the noted jazz musician himself. And in addition to Hancock’s talk, there will be a number of other keynote addresses, such as the history keynote address by Doris Kearns Goodwin, accompanied by Tom Ashbrook, the host of On Point on WBUR and NPR. Goodwin is a historian who is uniquely qualified to discuss presidential politics from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama and whose bestselling book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2012 Academy Award–winning film Lincoln. Immediately following Goodwin’s panel at 2:15 p.m., the sanctuary at Copley Square’s Trinity Church will host a 4 p.m. discussion by preeminent architect Lord Norman Foster, as interviewed by Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

An annual highlight of the BBF is One City, One Story (1C1S), which features an open discussion with an author about one of their stories, printed in booklet form and distributed months prior to eager readers hoping to attend the panel. In the past, authors such as Tom Perrotta (“The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face”), Rishi Reddi (“Karma”) and Anna Solomon (“The Lobster Mafia Story”) have bantered and otherwise interacted with hundreds of excited readers who’ve devoured their stories. This October’s talk will feature the story “Sublimation” by Jennifer Haigh, who won not only a PEN/Hemingway award for her novel Mrs. Kimball in 2003, but also a PEN/Hemingway award for her novel News from Heaven in 2014.

The Boston Book Festival has benefited not only from a remarkable array of attending authors, but also from the many merchants who come to distribute their literary wares, as well as the hundreds of volunteers who in their general-issue orange tee shirts resemble an army of traffic cones—safely guiding visitors to their preferred destinations around and about the neighborhood’s literary anchor: the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street.

I recall that when I volunteered at the first festival in 2009, there was only a Friday night keynote address in Trinity Church—by Robin Young, host of the WBUR radio program Here and Now, and a performance by musician Livingston Taylor—and the Saturday panels, capped off by an evening talk by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, which proved so popular that the BBF immediately outgrew the small number of venues available to host them.

The following year, 2010, the BBF brought out an estimated 24,000 visitors—double the number of the inaugural event. And now, six years later, the festival continues to grow; but finding an appropriate number of suitable venues still presents a challenge. Porter, a graduate of Brandeis University who holds a master’s degree in children’s literature from Simmons College, has continued to meet that challenge. Ably assisted by her husband, MIT professor and author Nicholas Negroponte, as well as a small and devoted staff, Porter’s success is evidenced by the zealous attendees who come in eager waves that show no signs of ebbing any time soon.

Did You Know?

The Boston Public Library (BPL) was the “first large free municipal library in the United States.” Opened to the public in 1854, the BPLʹs first location was originally on Mason Street and was actually only a few rooms within a public school. The building in Copley Square on Boylston Street became its main hub in 1895. Since then, it has become the home to 23 million items, including the personal library of John Adams; it has also become the center point for many a literary event such as the Boston Book Festival.