Boston Book Festival

SPARK: Reading Series.
Grief, love, death, living: The writers in this session take these existential topics and grapple with them in exciting new ways. K. Iver’s debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco, winner of the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an elegiac tribute to a first love lost. “Framed by grief and longing, the poet's vivid and eclectic imagination sprawls through each poem." (Tyehimba Jess) Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil centers on the modern Brazilian-American immigrant experience and is suffused with the ambition, loss, and longing that are specific to that experience as well as universal. “This is a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction" (NY Times). National Book Award finalist Joan Wickersham’s novel in verse, No Ship Sets Out To Be a Shipwreck, weaves a profound, personal story of loss from an encounter with an unsettling artifact: the sunken seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which lay undiscovered for three hundred years, and now sits in a museum exhibit dedicated to its failed journey. This session will be moderated by Dawn Tripp, bestselling author of Jackie and Georgia.

SPARK: Reading Series. In this session, you’ll hear three authors whose work takes us to far-flung locales: from the Scottish Highlands to the wilds of Calabria to surreal interplanetary worlds—all of them peopled with richly depicted characters who blaze with life. Juliet Grames’s The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a wild ride through the crime-ridden cliffs of Southern Italy, where an American woman tries to solve a murder—and find meaning in her life at the same time, described by The Boston Globe as a “deeply compelling, well-crafted mystery.” In NY Times bestselling author Margot Livesey’s historical novel, The Road From Belhaven, a young girl with the gift of second sight sets out to forge her own future at a time when women’s options were limited by circumstance. “Margot Livesey is an incandescent writer…always imbuing her characters with astonishing humanity and grace” (NY Times). The stories in Ruben Reyes Jr.’s There is a Rio Grande in Heaven range widely across time and place, creating dreamlike worlds that help us to make sense of our own. "Tethered to historical fact and enlivened by speculative elements, Reyes' fiction brings into focus the troubling legacies that stalk so many Central American nations." (Kirkus) This session will be moderated by Whitney Scharer, founder of the Arlington Author Salon and author of The Age of Light.

SPARK: Reading Series.
Any writer worth their salt knows about “The Hero’s Journey”, Joseph Campbell’s archetypal template for storytelling. The first step on that journey? The hero gets a “call to adventure”… and what happens next is up to the novelist. In Stephen McCauley’s You Only Call When You’re In Trouble, the story begins with a literal call that sends the main character on a journey to save a family member’s career—and shows us how meaningful the bonds of even the most dysfunctional family can be. This witty novel is a perfect example of there being  “no greater pleasure than reading a seasoned writer at the top of his form” (Shelf Awareness). Mark Cecil’s Bunyan and Henry reimagines the origin stories of folk heroes Paul Bunyan and John Henry, who join forces in the novel to battle the ultimate nemesis: corporate greed. “This big-hearted take on the mythic past feels all too relevant right now” (Ben Percy). In Crystal King’s In The Garden of Monsters, a model receives a call to a truly surreal adventure: to accompany Salvador Dali on an artistic journey to the Sacro Bosco—Italy's Garden of Monsters. Eerie and hauntingly atmospheric, the novel “is an exciting reinterpretation” (Publishers Weekly) of the myth of Prosperpina. This session will be moderated by Whitney Scharer, founder of the Arlington Author Salon and author of The Age of Light.

A stellar line-up of spoken word poets—Parker-Vincent Alva, Princess Moon, D. Ruff, Amanda Shea, Essmaa Litim, and Maria Zaki— take the stage and steal some hearts in a fast-paced, time-stopping poetry extravaganza. Whether you’re a longtime fan of spoken word or this is your first experience, this performance is sure to immerse you in poetry and leave you wanting more. Our moderator is Amanda Shea, a two-time Boston Music Award-winning Spoken Word Artist. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.