Category Archives: Events

Bookstock Festival, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

The second annual Bookstock Festival occurs this Saturday, May 20th, at the New Heights Community Resource Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The event is hosted by The Literacy Council of West Alabama and is FREE!

The Bookstock Festival kicks off at 10 am and will close at 2 pm. So it’s a narrow window if you can get there. The folks from the University of Alabama Books Arts Program will be leading a book construction session starting at 10:30 am-12:30 pm.

There is also a painting project where folks can paint Little Library boxes.
There will be author readings, information tables for local area book clubs as well as sign-ups for tutoring help, plus scavenger hunts, photo booths, and more!

It’s free to get in, and lunch is free too!

Fingers crossed that the weather is good and the turnout is even better. Seeing how book-related events can unite communities and help improve things is fun.

For more information, you can contact The Literacy Council of West Alabama.

Alabama Writers Hall of Fame – Class of 2023

The Alabama Writers Hall of Fame will induct its 2023 class during a march 10th dinner in Tuscaloosa. Tickets start at $150 per plate if you’re eating. The occasion begins at 6 p.m. with cocktails and dinner at 7 p.m.

Founded in 2014, the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame is the highest honor an Alabama author can receive from the state. The 2023 inductees are Tom Franklin, Trudier Harris, Angela Johnson, Howell Raines, Michelle Richmond, and Daniel Wallace (Daniel Wallace has a very good book coming out in April that I mentioned in a previous post). 

Authors Eugene Walter and Kathryn Tucker Windham will be inducted posthumously.

Billed as a ‘gala event,’ this year’s proceedings will be overseen by Harper Lee Award winner Carolyn Haines. The dinner features food and cocktails by Eugene Walter, who was famous for hosting parties with Truman Capote way back when.

Alabama Writers Hall of Fame images
Official promotion image created by the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame

This is the first in-person gathering held by the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame since before the pandemic.

During that event, they inducted seven Alabama authors. The 2020 class included Mark Childress, Faye Gibbons, Carolyn Haines, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Michael Knight, with authors Ralph Ellison and Zelda Fitzgerald being inducted posthumously.

Here is a list of all the past Alabama Writers Hall of Fame inductees:

The 2018 Inductee List

  • Joseph Glover Baldwin
  • William Bradford Huie
  • Shirley Ann Grau
  • Gay Talese
  • Wayne Greenhaw
  • Charles Gaines
  • James Haskins
  • Winston Groom

The 2016 Inductee List

  • E. O. Wilson
  • Fannie Flagg
  • Rodney Jones
  • Rebecca Gilman
  • Truman Capote
  • T.S. Stribling
  • Margaret Walker
  • Mary Ward Brown
  • Sequoyah

The 2015 Inductee List

  • Rick Bragg
  • Andrew Glaze
  • Johnson Jones Hooper
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Helen Keller
  • Harper Lee
  • William March
  • Albert Murray
  • Sena Jeter Naslund
  • Helen Norris Bell
  • Sonia Sanchez
  • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

I assume that no one was inducted in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, which is perfectly understandable. I have looked and looked, and I can not find a mention of why there were no Alabama Writers Hall of Fame classes for the years 2017 and 2019. If you know why that is, chime in and let a curious book blogger know.

Join Wayne Flynt as he talks about his new book & friend Harper Lee

Hey Birmingham, AL book readers and history buffs… I just saw that Wayne Flynt is speaking this weekend at the Avondale public library. It’s a free event (Flynt is on a 40-city book tour) where he’ll discuss and answer questions about his book Afternoons with Harper Lee. 

The event is:

  • Sunday, February 26, 2023
  • 2:00 pm–3:00 pm
  • Avondale Library
  • 509 40th Street South

The folks from Thank You Books will be there too, selling Flynt’s book so you can walk out with a signed copy as well as get to hear from one of Alabama’s best historians and storytellers. Flynt’s books are always some of the best-researched and poignant. 

wayne flynt book about harper lee
Cover design by Randall Williams

Wayne Flynt and Harper Lee were longtime friends, so he knows the very private novelist well enough to write a book like this. It sounds like most of the stories and reflections come from his visiting Lee during the last years of her life (she died in 2016). No doubt Flynt has some unique insights to share from all of his discussions with Lee.

Afternoons with Harper Lee is published by New South Books which was recently acquired by the University of Georgia Press. While it’s sad that Alabama lost a publisher it is great to see that they have landed somewhere as srong as the UGA Press program is.

I love this praise quote that is inside the book:

“Wayne Flynt is the great Talmudic scholar of Alabama, and this vivid, affecting deconstruction of his friendship with Harper Lee through the history that produced them both is a huge reward and pleasure for those of us who understand that, unaccountably, all roads seem to lead to our grand and terrifying state.”
Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama–The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Hay Festival 2021

The sun is shining and it feels good to have 2020 way behind us. While being safe/stuck at home wasn’t the best, one positive to come out of it is the way book festivals how to do virtual events and this year’s Hay Festival is building on last year’s experience!

Things kicked off a couple of days ago and virtual events are planned all the way through Sunday, June 6th. It’s a long weekend here in the States and I hope to get to take in some of the events.

You can check out the full schedule here. You do have to register for the events, but I haven’t had to pay anything yet. I’m not sure if everything is free or if I’ve just clicked on the freebies. What makes all of this even better is that you can go through the video archives and watch events from the past.

While attending a Hay Festival, in person, is still a bucket list item for me, I love being an armchair attendee. And now that their online shop is up and running, it’s fun to scroll through all of the signed copies of Festival books plus all of the gifts, including chairs with the Festival logo, mugs, shirts, stationery and more. All the money collected here goes to support the festival.

I hope this post finds you healthy and doing well and that you’re able to tune in to at least one Hay Festival session that interests you.

Are there other virtual events this summer that should not be missed? Let me know!