Dear Friends,

We wish we could write 3,500 thank-you notes to everyone that attended and volunteered at the inaugural Mississippi Book Festival. So if you will, this is our collective thank-you!

On August 22, 2015, 3,750 people enjoyed 22 panels with 163 authors, powered by more than 200 volunteers, with 256 guests who enjoyed the sold-out Willie Morris Memorial Luncheon honoring our independent booksellers. While we were at the Capitol, hundreds more visited the exhibitor tents and attended the Library of Congress and Mississippi Library Commission presentations. An untold number of people watched live on C-SPAN. Whew! YOU were the reason we did this.

A special thank-you to our official panelists. This was for you, too. We were thrilled to celebrate your craft and link you with old and new readers.

Thanks to ALL of our financial and in-kind contributors who helped make the festival possible and to ALL of our volunteers who likewise helped make the festival possible. We obviously could not have done this without all you.

A big thank you goes to our state leadership who provided the bulk of the funding and to ALL of the staff at the State Capitol who not only welcomed us with open arms but worked overtime to make the building and grounds so welcoming.

Galloway Methodist Church not only hosted the largest session of the festival (when more than 700 crowded into the sanctuary to hear Jerry Mitchell moderate a conversation between Bill Ferris and John Grisham), but then reopened their doors at 5:00 when the demand for the last panel was three times larger than we could accommodate in the Capitol. Thank you, Galloway.

We greatly appreciate all of our friends who helped to publicize the festival, through the media, their organizations, their workplaces, and their professional networks.

Thank you one and all. We learned a lot from our first festival and promise to do it bigger and better when we gather on August 20, 2016 to once again celebrate at our own Literary Lawn Party.

2015 photo gallery coming soon to the website, www.msbookfestival.com!

​Thank you for making the first Mississippi Book Festival such a success!

We’re interested in your feedback so that we can continue improving the Festival for years to come. Please fill out the survey at the link below to let us know what your experience was like:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WGNG8N9

We are thrilled to announce that John Grisham will be officially participating in the inaugural Mississippi Book Festival!

His book, Sycamore Row, was selected as the summer reading book for Mississippi Reads and A Time To Kill as well as Ford County are two of our favorites. We are honored that he is contributing to our celebration of literacy, ideas and imagination. Look for an updated event schedule on our website this week.

Join us August 22nd for what is shaping up to be a hallmark event for the state of Mississippi.

The Mississippi Book Festival is free and open to everyone….spread the word!

by John Evans, Lemuria Books

Mississippi’s literary contributions have enhanced our state and national culture. Our great writers are household names; many of their stories are our stories. But before great writers put pen to paper, they were first great readers.

In my 40 years of bookselling, I have witnessed the power of real books in the hands of readers. In our first statewide book festival, The Mississippi Book Festival, we will celebrate the joys of reading and the authors who bring our culture to the page. Reading real books is where it all starts.

Mississippians are encouraged to read John Grisham’s Sycamore Row together. Reading together, we live together.

The first Mississippi Book Festival, I hope the first of many, will bring awareness to our strong literary history. Perhaps this festival will be the first step toward creating a Literary Book Trail in Mississippi and eventually, a Mississippi Writers Museum.