The Annapolis Book Festival 2016
The Key School Brings Literary Powerhouses to Annapolis
Recently, we sat down with the gracious head of the Annapolis Book Festival, Ms. Liz Filter, and discussed the festival’s evolution as well as the highlights coming in 2016!
- How long has the book festival been going on, and what was the impetus to start it?
We are actually in our fourteenth year. The book festival started as originally a group of parents from The Key School, who wanted to share a love of learning going on. So, instead of doing something solely for The Key School, we decided to make it a community event. They wanted to make it more than your conventional book fair. Of course we had all the elements, as we have used book sales, Scholastic Books comes, and we have entertainment and activities for the kids. But really what it is…they bring in just these incredible authors, and they are looking for authors who have published within the last year. It has to be current. In fact, we have some authors this year who their books are coming out this week or in a week or two. We’ve gotten access to those books, and it really makes for some exciting panels. As well as really topical conversations.
2. How has the Annapolis Book Festival grown and changed over the last fourteen years?
This is my second time chairing it. I chaired it five years ago so I do have a little bit of perspective as I wasn’t there at the beginning. It’s gotten larger, and it’s reputation has really grown. Now we’ve gotten to the point where we start looking for authors and reaching out to authors for the next year (which we will do pretty much when this year’s festival is over), but people recognize the name. The Annapolis Book Festival does have a reputation with authors and also book publishers. So with authors, we’re reaching out to them. Maybe we hear something on the radio or an interview or something on TV, or we learn that they’re publishing something, but we also get quite a few inquiries from the authors, themselves, or their publishers reaching out to us. They say, “Hey, my authors going to be a book tour next year and could this fit in?” or “Would you create a panel around this book?” It really is just give and take.
I’m really happy to see how much it’s grown. Of course, we want to keep it that accessible, reachable event. So we don’t want it to get too much bigger as we want to be able to serve everybody, and do it on the confines of The Key School campus. We usually expect between two and three thousand people…lately, usually bordering on the three thousand. It’s a really nice size, but you really have to look at the schedule and kind of plan your day…so much is going on and I don’t want people to miss out on fun things.
3. How long have you all had the comics section as part of the book festival, and has that been fairly popular with children?
The comics started about four years ago, and we get an awful lot of support from Third Eye Comics and Art Way Alliance. And between the two of them, we really create this cool vibe. Sort of like a Comic Con but it’s a “Comic Key.” We’ll have a comics shop and a comic book swap. We have illustrators — just children — who are interested in maybe animating something. We’ve got different artists set up to talk about that. We have that lounging feel where you can just come in…we even have those adult coloring books. It’s not just that we want to reach the book community or all kinds of ages, but we want to read all kinds of readers. We even have a panel this year called Bio-Graphic, and it’s adult graphic novels but they’re biographies. One’s on Steve Jobs and one’s on [Edward] Snowden. Of course we’ve got the [three] Pulitzer Prize winners and The New York Times Best Sellers, we’ve got politics and history. But we also have parenting, and, so, we’re really trying to reach a lot of people. It’s streams of interests that our parents [at The Key School] and our volunteers have, and we just want to share that with everybody else.
4. So this festival really reflects the intellectual curiosity also promoted by The Key School, correct?
That really is the backbone of The Key School Curriculum. Not only do we want to encourage that for our students and ourselves and our community but also our staff and our teachers as well. So we encourage that by not only having events like this but also encouraging their continuing education for themselves as well. I’m really excited by it, and I believe in it because I have two children and they’ve been here for eight years…let me tell you, we just love this school and we love the people and how active they are. It’s just a very interesting, interesting place to be.
5. What are your big responsibilities with this festival as you basically run the show, and what have been the best parts of it as well as some of the big challenges of 2016?
It’s been so exciting for about a year. Just to give you some background, we’ll start planning soon for next year. We’ll do a review or a debrief of this year and then right away just start reaching out to the authors. Then we’ll get together with our committee chairs in the fall, right when school is starting back up. So it’s a year round thing. I just love that each year, it’s so easy to pull those special people together…as far as this year, we’re especially proud of…you just have to start with Diane Rehm. We really call her our headline…she’s got the anchor spot, right in the middle, and she’s got a special story and she’s willing to share that with us with her memoir, On My Own. She’s talking about that book and her husband’s struggles with Parkinson’s disease, and how she has become an advocate for the right to die movement. Just to have someone like her and a story that’s near and dear to her heart and to a lot of people’s hearts. I’m really touched by that…I’m getting overwhelmed because it is…to have someone like that coming to little old Key School, I think is terrific.
We have the three Pulitzer Prize winners this year, and that’s special. We’re happy to have them, especially on the hundredth anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize. We usually have Pulitzer Prize winners anyway, but I’m especially glad this year because of the anniversary. We’ve got some Shakespeare activities, and that’s because we’re marking the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Of course, a book festival wouldn’t be complete without Shakespeare so we’re glad to have that. We were really just trying to honor those kinds of milestones and bring it into what we were trying to do with this event.
6. As an NPR nerd, of course Diane Rehm was what caught my eye first about the festival, but it’s so humbling to think of everything coming to Annapolis, but do you think being nestled between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. helps?
I think we do have an advantage in that Annapolis has that smaller feel, but the town, itself has a lot to offer. But we’ve got a mix of national authors as well as local authors coming. We have authors from as far away as Chicago and New York and we even have someone from France this year. But we have a lot of local authors too and this is a great back drop for that since this city is so vibrant and we’re close enough to D.C. where all the policy makers are working so hard. We try to tap into the current events and those types of things that are happening just down the road.
7. How do editors, agents or writers interest in the 2017 festival get in contact with you all in the correct way?
So we’ll have a link on our website, which is http://www.keyschool.org/annapolisbookfestival and at that point [when it’s up], it’ll say “Are you interested in being an author” and then we’ll start the discussions and the back and forth and see if it might fit in with what we’re trying to accomplish and also make sure that we can provide and fulfill the things that they’re looking for as well.
8. Where can we find you on social media and on the web?
We do have an event Facebook page. For Twitter, we’ve been using The Key School Twitter account. For this year, we’re using the hashtag: #AnnapolisBookFestival and we’ve shared that with our authors and it’s starting to light up. Look for that and we’ll be using [the tag] a lot the day of as well!
A special thanks to The Annapolis Book Festival and to The Key School and Ms. Liz Filter for taking the time to speak with us about the event. We’ll be live-tweeting from the panels and bringing you the day’s activities tomorrow from #AnnapolisBookFestival
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