Boston Book Festival

Join us for an engaging session presented by the Boston Comic Arts Foundation, where we explore the art of visual storytelling in memoirs! Discover how personal choices shape the creator's narrative and how the medium influences the connection with readers. Join acclaimed creators Julie Heffernan and Jesse Lee Kercheval as they share their journeys of transforming their unique stories into compelling comic forms. Heffernan's Babe in the Woods follows a young mother lost in the woods who discovers a new perspective on life, while Kercheval's French Girl delves into the profound impacts of family—both tangible and intangible. Don’t miss this opportunity to dive into the creative process of graphic writing and portraying oneself in the visual. The session will be moderated by Caroline Hu, Assistant Professor of Integrative Sciences and Biological Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Each of the astonishing books discussed in this session tells America’s origin stories by examining the histories of specific families. In Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier, Robert Parkinson describes the decidedly unheroic, bloody savagery of the frontier through the tragic story of an Iroquois clan and a family of frontiersmen. John Kaag follows the fortunes of the Blood family from their involvement in the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century through the founding of the colonies, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and first-wave feminism in American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation. Lori Ginzberg, in Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History, traces the descendants of one slave, whose complicated blood kin relationships demonstrate the impact of Black life on every aspect of American history. The conversation among these stellar scholars will be led by Megan Marshall, whose biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

Join us for a conversation with three writers who explore how women have struggled to win influence in U.S. politics and how laws and public policies, mostly designed by men, have profoundly affected women’s lives. Jackie, the fifth novel by bestselling author Dawn Tripp, explores the complex emotional truths behind the myths surrounding the Kennedys, to give readers a nuanced story of a brilliant woman who forged a legacy out of grief, shaping history even as she lived it. In A Termination, award-winning poet and memoirist Honor Moore recounts her harrowing experience in the 1960s with an unwanted pregnancy and raises the alarm about a world without reproductive freedoms. Gioia Diliberto’s eighth book, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition, relates the fierce battle waged by women over Prohibition in the first expression of female political power after winning the right to vote. The cross-genre session will be moderated by Pulitzer Prize winner Debby Applegate, whose most recent book, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, depicts the life of the notorious madam who wielded unprecedented power in the 1920s in New York City’s demimonde of gangsters, politicians, policemen, columnists and society figures. Sponsored by Beacon Hill Books & Cafe.