By Erin Wood
Calling all book lovers and anyone looking for some awesome entertainment! Set your calendar for the virtual Six Bridges Book Festival (formerly the Arkansas Literary Festival), October 8–18.
As always, the Fest offers something for everyone, with more than 60 authors and presenters writing nonfiction, fiction, and children’s titles.
In the mood to take out some aggression in the kitchen? Attend Katherine Alford’s Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices. Love short fiction brimming with questions about respectability and freedom? Check out Camille Acker’s short fiction collection, Training School for Negro Girls.
Want to learn how one woman launched an underground bakery that distributed thousands of marijuana brownies per month and helped provide medical marijuana to AIDS patients in San Francisco? See the session with Alia Volz on her book Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco.
Want to discuss how queers build and signal identity through fashion? See Megan Volpert’s session for Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear.
Arkansas authors participating with newly-released books include Hot Springs native Stephanie Storey (Raphael, Painter in Rome), Kevin Brockmeier (The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories), Frederick McKindra (whose work appears in A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South), Jen Fawkes (Mannequin and Wife: Stories), Tyrone Jaeger (Radio Eldorado), Stacey Margaret Jones (Mr. Catherine), Emily Roberson (Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters), Jennifer A. O’Brien (The Hospice Doctor’s Widow: A Journal), Kat Robinson (102 More Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die), and Padma Viswanathan (São Bernardo), among others.
For a full listing of authors and presenters, visit: https://cals.org/six-bridges-book-festival/authors-presenters/
A Hot Springs native, Erin Wood is a writer, editor, and publisher in Little Rock. She owns and runs Et Alia Press (etaliapress.com). Wood is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives (April, 2019) and editor of and a contributor to Scars: An Anthology (2015).
