Sponsored by the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, the 28th annual Concord Festival of Authors (CFA) will go LIVE online in a new format to celebrate the written and spoken word with a global audience. The CFA events will take place via Zoom from October 16 to October 31, 2020 in collaboration with several organizations in Concord, with many events hosted by the Concord Free Public Library. Event registration links are open on the CFA website, www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.
On Friday, October 16th at 7pm, the Concord Festival of Authors and the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library kick off the Festival by welcoming this year's winner of the Ruth Ratner Miller Memorial Award for Excellence in American History, Jill Lepore. A prolific, celebrated author, Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: a History of the United States and This America: The Case for the Nation. Her latest work, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, released on September 15, 2020, has been longlisted for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
On Friday, October 23 at 7pm, CFA Keynote Speaker Jennifer Haigh, award-winning novelist and short story writer, will discuss why in a time of national crisis – political, medical, financial, environmental and moral – storytelling is more important than ever. Haigh’s novel Heat and Light won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her previous books include Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and the short story collection News from Heaven, which won the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction.
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The CFA will also present a variety of programming to highlight the Concord Free Public Library’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity. The events include such panels as “Anti-Racism and Reconstruction, Then and Now” with The Robbins House on Sunday, October 18, at 5:00 – 6:30 pm; LGBTQ Memoirs on Friday, October 30 at 7:00 pm; and Young Adult and Children’s Literature, on Sunday, October 24 at 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., respectively.
Please join the Concord Festival of Authors and the Concord Free Public Library LIVE online between October 16 and 31 to continue the tradition of celebrating the written and spoken word. For a complete listing of CFA events and Festival partners, please visit the CFA website at www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.