WOODSTOCK, Vt. — Bookstock, the Green Mountain Festival of Words, will host 45 authors at its 11th annual literary festival in Woodstock, Vermont, on July 26 – 28. They include 11 novelists, 22 non-fiction authors, and 12 poets. In addition will be dance and musical performances and the annual juried exhibition of book art produced by ArtisTree. Festival events are free and open to the public.
Jordan Engel, Bookstock coordinator, said “We want everyone to discover something new and important for themselves. So we designed a festival for all tastes and ages.”
The Saturday, 10 a.m. keynote speaker will be Marcelo Gleiser, a physicist at Dartmouth who has explored, since his youth in Brazil, the intersections of cosmology with the human mind. He will talk about the limits of what we can know about the world and ourselves and how the sciences and the humanities may together shed some light on the mystery of who we are.
The three-day event mixes together nationally recognized and rising authors, many of whom reside in Vermont. They include the cartoonist Ed Koren, master illustrator David Macauley, and former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin. Poets include Carolyn Forche, long recognized for her poetic skill in witnessing the struggle for justice and peace.
The venues of the festival are mostly very close to the town’s beautiful green. On the Green will be a massive second hand book sale, a virtual reality demo tent, a “hire-a-poet’ tent, twenty exhibitors, a food court and live music.
Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press will receive the Vermont Literary Inspiration Award for outstanding inspiration to the literary prosperity and traditions of Vermont.
Some 25 area nonprofits and businesses put on or support the festival. Its website, bookstockvt.org, describes the festival program.
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