Yes, Virginia, there WILL be a book festival this year.
All systems are “Go” for the 13th annual Tucson Festival of Books, March 12-13 at the University of Arizona.
“Hallelujah!” said author and festival favorite J.A. Jance. “After two years of virtual presentations, Zoom meetings and staying at home, it will be good to see real people again.”
It’s been awhile.
Faced by a then-just-emerging pandemic, the 2020 festival was canceled four days before it was set to begin. Last year’s “festival” was virtual, with author conversations available for viewing on the festival website.
Fingers were still tightly-crossed as recently as six weeks ago, but with COVID case-count numbers now in free-fall, festival topsiders recently green-lighted final preparations for a live, in-person bookapalooza the second weekend in March:
This week, Arizona Party Rental started installing the 300 tents that will be used by exhibitors, vendors, and authors during book festival weekend.
The UA Bookstore is now sorting the 18,000 books it has ordered for its sales areas.
180 exhibitors have begun packing up the displays and merchandise they will truck to campus March 11.
15 food vendors are placing non-refundable orders for festival fare.
Hotel reservations are being confirmed for more than 200 out-of-town authors.
And, at long last, Executive Director Melanie Morgan has uncrossed her fingers.
“I just hope everybody remembers how to do this,” she laughed. “We haven’t done one of these in three years!”
The road back after a two-year hiatus was hardly a Sunday drive. As recently as last month, COVID numbers were at record highs.
Publishers were not yet ready to send their authors out on book tours. Simon and Schuster actually prohibited its employees from traveling.
Closer to home, there was a different challenge. The book festival is powered by volunteers. More than 200 work on the event all year long. Another 1,100 provide the workforce during the festival itself.
Volunteers felt the same wariness that authors did.
It hasn’t been easy, but slowly and then surely the idea of a live book festival began gaining traction.
By January 1, the stage was set. When the virus numbers began to collapse two weeks later, the cast was ready.
David Nix and Lindy Mullinax are the volunteers who coordinate all the others. Nix: “One big challenge was trying to plan a live, in-person event when we couldn’t have live, in-person meetings. There’s a mixed message there. It’s been so long since things were ‘normal,’ people had to get back into the frame of mind that normality was even possible.”
Patience became practice.
“I can’t think of a single deadline we didn’t push back, to give people a little more time,” Mullinax said. “We usually have our author lists finalized by Thanksgiving. This year it was Christmas. It’s been like that for everything. We decided it was more important to do things right than to do them ‘on time.’ “
Nix and Mullinax are still trying to find all the loose ends, but as the COVID clouds part at least the lighting is good.
The Tucson Festival of Books will be slightly smaller than it was when the 2019 event broke all previous records for attendance, book sales, perfect weather and general buzz.
Staffing cutbacks at the university have led to a smaller footprint in Science City. There will be one Food Court instead of two. One of the entertainment stages has become an author stage.
Still, the festival will offer 267 authors and 268 presentations on 31 festival stages.
Visitors are welcome to stroll the Mall, listen to music or meet their favorite authors.
Admission price is the same as it has always been: free.
And the welcome mat will be out … if Morgan, Nix and Mullinax can just remember where they stored it three years ago!
Footnotes
The book festival still needs volunteers for the weekend of the event. If you would like to be part of the Tucson Festival of Books, you can choose your own task and sign up by visiting the festival website: TucsonFestivalOfBooks.org
“A Conversation with Mary Roach” will launch book festival weekend on Thursday, March 10. Roach, “the biology teacher we all wish we’d had,” will discuss and sign her latest bestseller “Fuzz.” The program will begin at 6:00 p.m. on the UA campus. For more, visit the festival website.
Three authors will keep their attendance records perfect this year. J.A. Jance, Thomas Perry and Luis Alberto Urrea will be attending their 13th Tucson Festival of Books. Their streak began with the first one in 2009. They were scheduled to attend the 2020 event that was cancelled, too.
This year’s author list includes several others who attended the first festival. They include Billy Collins, Alison Deming, Fenton Johnson, Lydia Millet and Adam Rex.
Participants and attendees at the festival must follow the university health and safety guidelines. One of them is wearing a mask in all indoor spaces, including the tents and exhibitor booths on the Mall.
