The Baltimore City Lit Festival
I'm going to give this to you straight. The headlining act at this years Baltimore City Lit Festival, the author and photographer of Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women over 50, will be real interesting. That's not why you should go. The talk on the Clarence Thomas biography and Kwame Alexander's new book of love poetry, those may be even better than the Jewels stuff, but they are not the reason to go either.
You should go to the City Lit Festival because it's like being inside the cage with the tigers. Writers and editors roam the floor of the beautiful Enoch Pratt Library along with the crowd. This is, in fact, where we writers do our networking. This is where we meet and plan our next big books and who will publish them. This is our backstage. You may see no author you know, but then you may get into a conversation, like I did last year, with David Kipen, director for the National Endowment for the Arts.
And maybe the smaller writers are most interesting anyway. Dressed down, with independently published books loving stacked on half of a folding table and an air of anxiety and tension surrounding them, these authors prove that literature's blood is still boiling. These authors care so much you can see it etched in their faces. So while the polished main stages of City Lit will entertain, it's the gritty main floor that makes the City Lit Festival my favorite event of the year. I will see you there.
The Baltimore City Lit Festival IV
Saturday May 12, 2007
10:30am - 5pm
Enoch Pratt Free Library,
400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore 21201
