Baltimore Book Festival to return in September

BALTIMORE - Mayor Brandon Scott and Councilwoman Odette Ramos joined the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA) gathered Monday to announce the return of the Baltimore Book Festival.

The festival will take place September 27-29, and will be held around Waverly Main Street.

"Waverly Main Street is excited to support the return of the Baltimore Book Festival in Waverly," Waverly Main Street Executive Director Diana Emerson said. "As one of the organizers of the 2023 Waverly Book Festival we can't wait to welcome the rest of Baltimore to the neighborhood."

This will be the festival's 25th anniversary, but the first since 2019.

The 2023 festival created a critical platform for multiple local authors and poets of varying genres, as well as the neighborhood's booksellers and small businesses. 

This year's festival will highlight the immense breadth and depth of Baltimore's literary scene by hosting more authors, book sellers, and vendors from neighborhoods across the city. 

"This city has inspired literary greats throughout the ages — famous figures like Frederick Douglass, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Edgar Allan Poe, D. Watkins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Anna Deavere Smith, among many others," BOPA said in a statement. "The Baltimore Book Festival celebrates Baltimore's rich literary history, vibrant present, and bright future by connecting readers and authors and making the literary arts more engaging, entertaining, relevant, and accessible for all Baltimoreans. The festival will include literary salons, panel discussions, writing workshops, poetry readings, author talks, book signings, children's activities, live podcast recordings, and more."