Boston Book Festival! Saturday Oct. 27

I can't believe that next Saturday is the BBF, and that I haven't scheduled out my game plan to see as many amazing authors as possible!

It's also the last chance to earn extra credit for term 1...

Here are my "must attend" events:

Fiction: The Short Story

11:00am Trinity Sanctuary 206 Clarendon Street

 

Junot Diaz, a native of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, is a professor, writer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. He is the author of Drown and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Diaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Nancy Allen professor at MIT.

 

Stories on Stage

12:15pm Old South Church: Mary Norton Hall

Have you ever wanted to see your favorite picture books and fairy tales come to life? Here's your chance, thanks to the creative and enthusiastic teens who make up Hyde Square Task Force's Youth Literacy Theatre. They'll perform a series of short and funny plays based on children's books. Then it's your turn to get in on the act, with acting games and craft projects that you can take home!

Serious Satire

12:45pm Trinity Sanctuary 206 Clarendon Street

Baratunde Thurston is a politically-active, technology-loving comedian from the future. He co-founded the black political blog, Jack and Jill Politics, and served as Director of Digital for The Onion before launching the comedy/technology startup Cultivated Wit. He resides in Brooklyn, lives on Twitter, and has over thirty years experience being black. He writes the monthly backpage column for Fast Company, and his first book, How To Be Black, is a New York Times best-seller.

Graphic Novels: Drawing the Story

2:30pm Old South Sanctuary 645 Boylston Street

The brilliant Chris Ware will present Building Stories, described by Publishers Weekly as "the graphic novel of the season or perhaps the year...Ware takes visual storytelling to a new level of both beauty and despair." Charles Burns will show The Hive, volume two of the highly acclaimed X'd Out comic book. Legendary designer and writer Chip Kidd will present Batman: Death by Design, his architecture-themed Batman comic. And one of the brightest young stars of the genre, Gabrielle Bell, will show The Voyeurs as an opening act for the session. Hosted by writer and critic Eugenia Williamson.

Fiction: Time and Place

4:15pm Old South Sanctuary 645 Boylston Street

Tayari Jones is the author of Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow. Her debut novel, Leaving Atlanta, won the Huston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction, "Novel of the Year" by Atlanta Magazine, and the "Best Southern Novel of the Year" by Creative Loafing Atlanta. Her most recent novel, Silver Sparrow, was selected as among the best novels of 2011 by Library Journal, Slate, and Salon. Currently, she is an assistant professor in Rutgers-Newark University's MFA program.