Program Description
Event Details
Celebrating the Diversity of Michigan's Stories & Storytellers
The Farmington Author & Book Fest (FAB Fest) brings the community together to celebrate stories and storytellers from right here in Michigan! The Festival offers free admission to author readings, book signings, discussions, workshops, and more. Wander through the book marketplace offering publications by local authors and publishers - you'll be sure to find something that piques your interest. FAB Fest is a collaboration between KickstART Farmington and the Farmington Community Library.
FAB Fest 2024 will take place on June 1, 2024, in Downtown Farmington alongside Art on the Grand. View the full list of participating authors and publishers at farmlib.org/FAB-Fest.
FAB Fest Schedule
11-11:45 AM | Children’s Book Readings with authors Molly David (My Mischievous Wheelchair), Martha Johnston (Iki and his Mighty Friends), Jeffrey Roy Ford (Steadman Squirrel)
1-1:45 PM | The MacGuffin 40th Anniversary Reading
2-2:45 PM | A Conversation and Reading with Poets Joy Gaines-Friedler and Keith Taylor
3-3:45 pm | Romance Writers Roundtable, featuring D.A. Henneman, Isabelle Drake, and Natalie Dunbar, hosted by Rebecca Brown
4-4:45 PM | Author Reading with Award-Winning Writers Kathe Koja & Stephen Mack Jones
5-6:30 PM | Keynote Presentation/Reading and Conversation with Carolyn Forché
7-9 PM | Afterparty at KickstART Gallery
We are thrilled to announce that this year’s keynote presenter is award-winning poet, Carolyn Forché. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. Forché is perhaps best-known for coining the term “poetry of witness.” Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.
Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.
Forché will offer a poetry reading and talk followed by a book signing.
This year's Festival is generously sponsored by the Farmington Friends of the Library, Book Beat, the Farmington & Farmington Hills Foundation for Youth and Families, and The MacGuffin, a national literary journal produced at Schoolcraft College.