The West Virginia Book Festival is an annual event for book lovers of all ages and! Featuring programs by local and international bestselling authors, a Used Book Sale, and a Festival Marketplace, it takes place at the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center in downtown Charleston, West Virginia.
West Virginia Book Festival Attendance is (and always will be) free of cost.
Visit http://www.wvbookfestival.org/ for more details!
The whole family will enjoy our StoryWalk®, “Mrs. Honey’s Hat”, in the Library Walkway (entrances on Capitol and Summers Streets). Every day a different creature removes an item from Mrs. Honey’s large and outlandish hat, leaving behind something new in its place. StoryWalks® promote early literacy, physical activity, and family time together in nature.
Location: Kanawha County Public Library, 123 Capitol Street
Join the Kanawha County Public Library outside on the Plaza for a Summer Library Club pre-registration celebration!
Register to read in their annual Summer Library Club Challenge, play lawn games, make rainbow sand art, and enjoy the Capitol Street Art Fair! The theme of our reading challenge this year is Color Our World.
Earn colorful prizes as you read, no matter your age! Ask a staff member to register online or pick up a paper reading log inside. In case of inclement weather, we will be indoors on the Children’s Floor in the Main Library.
Location: Kanawha County Public Library Plaza, 123 Capitol Street
Curated and hosted by West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman, this year’s panel on written fiction will feature the works of Marie Manilla, Natalie Sypolt (change from print schedule), and Glenn Taylor.
Location: Taylor Books Annex Gallery, 226 Capitol St.
*FREE Event*
Glenn Taylor’s fourth novel, The Songs of Betty Baach won the 2023 Juniper Prize in Fiction. His first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. Glenn’s work has appeared in such venues as the Oxford American, The Guardian, Gulf Coast, and Huizache. Born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, he now resides with his family in Morgantown, where he is at work on a new novel.
Natalie Sypolt lives and writes in West Virginia. She is the author of The Sound of Holding Your Breath (2018, West Virginia University Press) and second book, tentatively titled If Only the Rain Would Come, is set to be published by University Press of Kentucky in 2026. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, r.kv.r.y., Superstition Review, Paste, Willow Springs Review, and The Kenyon Review Online, among other fine journals. Natalie is the former President of the Appalachian Studies Association, has taught in the low-residency MFA Program at West Virginia Wesleyan College, and works as an Associate Professor of English at Pierpont Community & Technical College.
West Virginia native Marie Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her novel, The Patron Saint of Ugly, received The Weatherford Award. Shrapnel won The Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel. Stories in her collection, Still Life with Plums, first appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, and other journals. Her essays have appeared in Word Riot, Cossack Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. Marie lives in her hometown of Huntington with her husband, Don Primerano.
Learn more about Marie here.
This year’s Annual Kanawha County Public Library Used Book Sale, in conjunction with the Capitol Street Art Fair and Children’s Art Fair, will be held at the Main Library in Room 311.
All proceeds help fund library programs and services.
Curated and hosted by WV Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman, this year’s panel will feature award-winning journalists Eric Eyre, Erin Beck, and Amelia Ferrell Knisely.
Each will read selections from their works, share insights regarding the field of journalism and reflect upon the current state of the literary world. The authors will also be open to audience Q&A.
This project is being presented with financial assistance from the West Virginia Humanities Council, a state affiliate for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations do not necessarily represent those of the West Virginia Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities
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Have a few minutes to help us out? We’d love to hear from you! Take our survey below – and of course want to hear more about any event ideas and what you’d like to see at future FestivALL events!
Marc Harshman hosts an evening of poetry readings and then the floor will be opened to attendees for discussion/Q&A.
Harshman’s WOMAN IN RED ANORAK, won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and was published in 2018 by Lynx House / University of Washington Press. His fourteenth children’s book, FALLINGWATER…, co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017 and was an Amazon Book of the Month. He is also co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. Harshman’s newest collection of poems, THE SHADOW TESTIMONIES, has just been scheduled for publication by Salmon Press in the Republic of Ireland.
Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.
Maggie Anderson was born in New York city in 1948. She moved to West Virginia when she was 13 years old, and attended public schools and West Virginia Wesleyan College (1966-1968) and West Virginia University. She received a B.A. in 1970 and an M.A. in creative writing in 1973. Anderson is the author of five books of poems, most recently Dear All (Four Way Books, 2017). She is also the author of Windfall: New and Selected Poems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), A Space Filled with Moving (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Cold Comfort (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), Years That Answer (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1980), Greatest Hits: 1984-2004 (Columbus: Pudding House Publications, 2004), and The Great Horned Owl (Riderwood: Icarus Press, 1979). She is the founding editor of the Wick Poetry First Book Series and the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series for Ohio Poets. In 1971 she co-founded Trellis, a poetry journal, with Winston Fuller and Irene McKinney, and served as editor until 1981. She is currently working on a novel.
Anderson’s awards and honors include two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the MacDowell Colony, including an Isabella Gardner Fellowship. In 2004, Emory and Henry College in Virginia honored her at their 23rd annual Appalachian Literary Festival, and Kent State University honored her with a Distinguished Scholar Award. In 2003, she received the Helen and Laura Kraut Memorial Ohioana Poetry Award from the Ohioana Library Association. In 2002, the KSU Alumni Association awarded her one of just three University Distinguished Teaching Awards. Anderson also received the B.B. Maurer WV Folklife Scholar Award from Fairmont State University, Fairmont, WV, for an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the preservation and perpetuation of Appalachian cultural heritage.
Anderson attended West Virginia Wesleyan College from 1966–68 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English, with high honors, from West Virginia University in 1970. Her M.A. in English (Creative Writing) in 1973 and an M.S.W. in 1977 were also from WVU. She worked as a rehabilitation counselor for blind and visually impaired clients at the West Virginia Rehabilitation Center from 1973-77. Beginning in 1979, she worked as poet-in-residence for ten years, in schools, senior centers, correctional facilities and libraries in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. She has served as visiting writer at several universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Oregon, the Pennsylvania State University, Hamilton College, and West Virginia University. In addition to her travels in the United States, Anderson has lived in Denmark (1992–1993) and traveled extensively throughout western and eastern Europe, Russia, and Scandinavia.
Anderson’s poems have been published in poetry journals, including The American Poetry Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, and Hamilton Stone Review, and her work has appeared in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. Essays have appeared in 17 anthologies and journals of contemporary poetry and poetics. Her poems have been set to music four times by contemporary composers, including “The Dream Vegetables” in Dreams and Nocturnes: Chamber Music of Stephen Gryc, “In Singing Weather” by Monica Houghton, “Nightmare,” by Anne LeBaron, and “Related to the Sky” from “Sun Songs and Nocturnes” by John David Earnest, an a cappella piece for male chorus performed at Lincoln Center in 1992 by Chanticleer and the New Jersey Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1989, Anderson began teaching creative writing at Kent State University and was appointed coordinator of the Wick Poetry Program in 1992. In 2004, when the Wick Poetry Program celebrated its 20th anniversary and received a $2 million endowment to create the Wick Poetry Center in the College of Arts and Sciences, Anderson was named director. Anderson was on the founding committee of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and served as Kent State University’s Campus Coordinator for the NEOMFA from 2003–2006 and as Director of the Northeast Ohio MFA Consortium from 2006-2009. Upon her retirement from Kent in 2009, the Maggie Anderson Endowment Fund was established in her honor. The Fund aims to assist talented writing students at the university with writing-related travel expenses.
The current Youth Poet Laureate for WV.
Past champion of the WV Poetry Out Loud competition.
Have a few minutes to help us out? We’d love to hear from you! Take our survey below – and of course want to hear more about any event ideas and what you’d like to see at future FestivALL events!