The San Antonio Book Festival, which will take place on Saturday, April 8, has released its extensive 2017 schedule of events to the public. To celebrate the growing event’s fifth year, officials created an easy and accessible way of navigating the festival’s many happenings.
The venues for the individual sessions range from locations within the Central Library to the Southwest School of Art to a tent run by Central Market on the library grounds. The sessions will begin at 10 a.m. and run about 45-60 minutes every hour until 5 p.m.
The PDF schedule is organized by venues and times. Since the festival is designed to be an all-day experience, organizers recommend that festival goers study the schedule and make a list of the events that interest them. A section of the schedule is labeled specifically for kids and teens.
The website’s festival info offers another helpful tool for navigating the schedule. Depending on their interests, users may select a series of tags organized by time, location, and categories such as cookbooks, fiction, anthologies, and more. This allows attendees to create a personalized schedule.
The events for this year’s festival encompass a variety of themes, many of which are politically charged and pertain to current social issues. Julissa Arce will address immigration during a session on her novel, “My (Underground) American Dream: My True Story as an Undocumented Immigrant Who Became a Wall Street Executive,” from 10-10:45 a.m. in the West Terrace of Central Library.
For those craving more lighthearted topics, Central Market will host several cooking sessions at its food tent in the Library Plaza. Festival goers can incorporate both heavy and more laid-back topics into their schedule, depending on how they want to structure their personalized festival experience.
With more than 103 writers scheduled to participate, the Book Festival is offering up its largest lineup to date. New York Times bestseller Ann Patchett, acclaimed novelist Amor Towles, and Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright represent some of the biggest nationally recognized names on the slate, while local and regional authors such as San Antonio Poet Laureates Laurie Ann Guerrero and Jenny Browne, Michael Soto, Vincent DiMaio, and Ron Franscell will appeal to hometown crowds.
“One of the things I love most about the festival is all the author’s conversations allow for the exchange of ideas and inspiration for literary discussion even after the festival is complete,” said Book Festival Executive Director Katy Flato.
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