COMPLETE LIST OF AUTHORS ANNOUNCED FOR SECOND ANNUAL Boston Book Festival

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Joyce Linehan (617) 282-2510 x 1, joyce@ashmontmedia.com


COMPLETE LIST OF AUTHORS ANNOUNCED FOR SECOND ANNUAL

BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL

TO TAKE PLACE OCTOBER 16, 2010

IN COPLEY SQUARE


(BOSTON-August 5, 2010) The highly anticipated and expanded second annual Boston Book Festival will take place on Oct. 16, 2010, in various locations around Copley Square. Festival Founder and Program Director Deborah Z Porter today announced the complete list of authors confirmed to appear at this year’s event. The featured authors represent a wide array of programming, and include Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Laureates, children’s writers, and writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Authors scheduled to appear at The Boston Book Festival:


Susan Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin)

Caroline Alexander (The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War; The Bounty)
Tom Barfield (Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History)

Barry Brunonia (The Map of True Places; The Lace Reader)

Kate Bernheimer (My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales)

Lisa Birnbach (True Prep; The Official Preppy Handbook)

*Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home)

Thanassis Cambanis (A Privilege to Die)

Nicholas Carr (The Shallows)

Kristin Cashore (Graceling; Fire)

Richard Cohen (Chasing the Sun; By The Sword)

Justin Cronin (The Passage; Mary and O’Neil)

Jef Czekaj (Hip & Hop, Don’t Stop)

Kathryn Davis (Hell: A Novel, The Thin Place)

Alan Dershowitz (The Trials of Zion)

Elyssa East (Dogtown)
David Edwards (The Lab: Creativity and Culture)

Hallie Ephron (Never Tell a Lie, The Bibliophile’s Devotional: 365 Days of Literary Classics)

Timothy Basil Ering (Snook Alone)

Haleh Esfandiari (My Prison, My Home)

Noah Feldman (The Scorpions: The Battles & Triumphs of FDR’s great Supreme Court Justices; The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State)

Joshua Ferris (The Unnamed, Then We Came to the End: A Novel)

Tyler Florence (Tyler’s Ultimate; Tyler Florence Family Meals)

Nick Flynn (The Ticking is the Bomb, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)

Alexis Frederick-Frost (Adventures in Cartooning)

Atul Gawande (Complications; The Checklist Manifesto)

Myla Goldberg (Bee Season; Wickett’s Remedy; The False Friend)

Christina Gonzalez (The Red Umbrella)

Allegra Goodman (The Cookbook Collector, Intuition; The Family Markowitz)

Andrew Gross (Reckless; The Dark Tide)

Jennifer Haigh (The Condition; Baker Towers; Mrs. Kimble)

Eric Haseltine (Long Fuse, Big Bang)
Edward Hirsch (The Living Fire; How to Read A Poem)

James Hirsch (Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend)

Erica Hirschler (Sargent’s Daughters)

Tony Hiss (In Motion: The Experience of Travel; The View from Alger’s Window)

*A.M Homes (This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers)

Ann Hood (The Red Thread; The Knitting Circle)

Michelle Hoover (The Quickening)

Marlon James (John Crow’s Devil; The Book of Night Women)

*Gish Jen (Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, World and Town)

Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)

Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants)

Chip Kidd (True Prep; The Cheese Monkeys)

*Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid)Jarrett Krosoczka (Lunch Lady series; Punk Farm)
Eric Kuhne (architect)

Kathryn Lasky (Guardians of Ga’Hoole)

*Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island; The Given Day)

Marianne Leone (Knowing Jesse)

Rose Lewis (I Love You Like Crazy Cakes; Orange Peel’s Pocket)

Brian Lies (Bats at the Ballgame; Bats at the Beach; Bats at the Library)

Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners)

Scott Magoon (Spoon; Mostly Monsterly)

Simon Mawer (The Glass Room)

Jill McDonough (Habeas Corpus)

Richard Michelson (Busing Brewster; Tuttle’s Red Barn)

Mark Moffett (Adventures Among Ants)

Nick Montfort (Book and Volume: Interactive Fiction, Racing the Beam)

Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid)

Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital)

*Joyce Carol Oates (them, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, Sourland)

Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser (Fancy Nancy and the Fabulous Fashion Boutique)

Mitali Perkins (Bamboo People, Secret Keeper)

Michael E. Porter (Redefining Health Care)

William Powers (Hamlet’s Blackberry)

David Rakoff (Half Empty)
Joanna Smith Rakoff (A Fortunate Age)

Aaron Renier (The Unsinkable Walker Bean)

John Rich (Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men)

Moshe Safdie (architect)

Michael Sandel (Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?)

*Stacy Schiff (Vera, A Great Improvisation, Cleopatra: A Life)

Juliet Schor (Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth)

Rob Scotton (Russell The Sheep; Scaredy Cat Splat)

*Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, The Idea of Justice)
David Shields (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto)

Brando Skyhorse (Madonnas of Echo Park)

Jessica Stern (Denial: A Memoir of Terror; Terror in the Name of God; The Ultimate Terrorists)

*Joseph Stiglitz (Freefall, Making Globalization Work)

Francisco Stork (Last Summer of the Death Warriors; Marcelo in the Real World)

Sir Peter Stothard (The Spartacus Road)

Maria Tatar (The Classic Fairy Tales, ed.)

Jerald Walker (Street Shadows)

*Edward O. Wilson (The Ants, The Naturalist, Anthill: A Novel)

*Kevin Young (Jelly Roll: A Blues, For the Confederate Dead, The Art of Losing)

Raffi Yessayan (2 in the Hat; 8 in the Box)

Da Zheng (Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveler from the East)


*previously announced authors


Panel hosts and moderators will include Tom Ashbrook (WBUR), Helene Atwan (Beacon Press), Joel Hyatt (Current TV), Peter Kadzis (Boston Phoenix), Bill Littlefield (WBUR’s It’s Only a Game), Neri Oxman (designer), Henriette Power (The Drum Literary Magazine), Faith Salie (actress, comedian), Megan Marshall (biographer), Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child), Bill Littlefield (WBUR), Andrew McAfee (research scientist), James Sebenius (Harvard Business Professor), Stefanie Friedhoff (journalist), and Jared Bowen (WGBH),


Locations in the Copley Square area include The Boston Public Library, Old South Church, Trinity Church, Church of the Covenant and John Hancock Hall.


Author bios are available at www.bostonbookfest.org. The complete program of events, including times, thematic groupings and exact locations, will be announced after Labor Day. In addition, the Boston Book Festival will announce details of a street fair on Copley Plaza, including music, vendors and children’s activities. All daytime events will be free. Details of a ticketed, evening event featuring music, spoken word and other media, will be announced soon.


The inaugural festival, held in October of 2009, was an unequivocal success. Organizers estimate that 12,000 people attended the presentations, panel discussions, workshops, music performances and street fair, most of which were free. The event featured 90 authors and presenters, including some of the biggest names in the literary world, 40 outdoor exhibitors, 30 indoor events, children’s activities, and live music. Internationally-known fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, critics and commentators spoke to packed houses at historic Boston locations.

The Boston Book Festival recently announced One City, One Story, a new initiative made possible with support from the Goldhirsh Foundation. The Boston Book Festival will publish a short story by a well-known local writer, which will be distributed as a bound booklet to 30,000 Bostonians, free of charge. It will also be available for download to anyone at www.bostonbookfest.org. Festival organizers are finalizing their choice of writer, and his or her name will be announced later this month. Distribution will take place at Boston Public Library branches, subway stations and other places where people gather, in October, in advance of the Boston Book Festival. Complete details about distribution times and locations will be available after Labor Day.

Boston Book Festival sponsors include Liberty Mutual, The Boston Foundation, Other Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hotel Commonwealth, The Plymouth Rock Foundation, Hachette Book Group, Bank of America, and The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Media sponsors include WBUR, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, New England Cable News, WBZ NewsRadio 1030, Mix 104.1, 103.3 WODS, WGBH, The Times Literary Supplement (of London) and The Boston Parents Paper.

Boston Book Festival Partners include Mayor Thomas M. Menino; The Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events; The City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department; ReadBoston; ArtsBoston; Mass Poetry Festival; ArtsFuse; Boston Public Library; Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston, the Boston Athenæum; PEN New England; Grub Street; Trinity Church; Old South Church; Boston Children’s Museum; Cambridge Public Library, New Center for Arts and Culture; 826 Boston; Brattle Theatre, Berklee College of Music; Emerson College.

For more information about the Boston Book Festival, visit www.bostonbookfest.org.