The Bucks County Book Festival announced its 2020 lineup featuring keynote speaker Ibram X. Kendi, who will discuss his bestselling book How To Be An Antiracist.
Kendi is a widely sought-after American author, historian and leading scholar of race and discriminatory policy in America. He is a National Book Award-winning and No. 1 New York Times bestselling author. The son of Methodist ministers, he is the founding director of Boston University’s BU Center for Antiracist Research, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a CBS News correspondent. For more information, visit prhspeakers.com.
How To Be An Antiracist has been described as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” It is a No. 1 bestseller in 2020 and currently No. 5 on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers list.
Kendi will appear at the Book Fest virtually via CrowdCast on Friday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. As a gift to the community for the support it has shown the Bucks County Book Festival, Kendi’s keynote event will be free. To register, visit bucksbookfest.org.
Book Fest’s popular Writers Workshop will return on Saturday, Sept. 26, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., virtually via CrowdCast.
This year’s workshop will feature two instructors – Kiley Reid, a New York Times bestselling author, and Kathryn Craft, a sought-after professional editor and writing coach.
Workshop sessions include:
– Finding the Story: Using Plot and Narrative Arc in Literary Fiction with Kiley Reid – Reid, author of Such a Fun Age, will focus on the importance of plot and the narrative arc in writing fiction
– Finding the Story in True Events: Creative Nonfiction with Kathryn Craft – Craft will focus on taking a fresh look at story elements that can make nonfiction read like a novel, and how popular works of creative nonfiction hook the reader with the same kind of entertaining and heart-warming material that makes all stories linger in the mind long after the book is closed
Tickets for the Writers Workshop are $20 and include both sessions. Proceeds benefit the 2021 Bucks County Book Festival. Register at bucksbookfest.org.
Book Fest’s 2020 One Book community read will feature three books by Kendi:
– How To Be An Antiracist (for adults)
– Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, written with Jason Reynolds (for teens/young adults)
– Antiracist Baby, available as a picture book (for children) and board book (for infants)
Books are available at the Bucks County Book Festival’s official bookseller, Doylestown and Lahaska Bookshops, at doylestownbookshop.com.
For more information on One Book, follow Book Fest’s One Book Facebook page for articles, links and prompts for discussion around the important topics discussed in these books.
