Hello Book Fest enthusiasts!
The board of the Fox Cities Book Festival is committed to our mission of celebrating books and authors to build an engaged community of readers, even as COVID-19 impacts our communities and events. We are proud to share with you that the 2020 Fox Cities Book Festival will take place as scheduled October 12-18.
To keep everyone who participates in the 2020 Festival healthy, and to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, we have reimagined the proceedings of the Festival.
A Reimagined Fox Cities Book Festival
Take heart, the Book Festival will still:
- Feature some of your favorite authors
- Connect you to your local library and community
- Bolster your reading lists for months to come
In the interest of public health, our board has decided to move the Fox Cities Book Festival primarily online. There is no safe way to host large, live events such as the Book Fest in fall of 2020, but we are committed to providing you with a virtual book festival that is easy-to-use, fun, and supportive of our local literacy communities.
Instead of live events hosted at venues across the Fox Cities, we will host an online platform of events that you can tune into from your computer or smart phone. All of the authors working with us this year have agreed to appear at the Festival virtually via video chat. We will announce our exciting speaker line up in July.
Additionally, regulations and public safety permitting, we will work with libraries to screen the virtual events for very small, socially-distanced groups who do not have access to a home computer or smart phone. This reimagined, in-person portion of the event will depend entirely on the state of public health and the boundaries public libraries are operating within this fall.
If you are apprehensive of your own ability to connect online for the Book Fest, please know we are committed to making the process as easy as possible. In the weeks leading up to the Book Fest, we will share fast, simple tutorials of how to login to the virtual event to chat with your favorite authors.
As a community-focused organization, we look forward to hosting this free, public book festival every year. We too are disappointed not to gather in-person this year, however, the risk to public health is too great for our large numbers to do so.
We also know that support of our literacy community is essential right now. Through the Festival, we provide financial and publicity support to dozens of authors, connect thousands of readers with the newest books, and build a sense of community through our work. Those reasons compel us to host the Festival online as regularly scheduled instead of canceling or postponing.
How You Can Help
Our events are free and open to the public and always have been. The Fox Cities Book Festival relies on small donations, grants, and sponsorship to put on this volunteer-led event in our communities and schools every year. If you are able, we would greatly appreciate a $20, $10, or $5 donation to help us host the Festival in October. You can make a donation of any size here.
If you are part of a local business interested in sponsoring the 2020 Fox Cities Book Festival, we welcome your support and can help you engage with a new audience of thousands of Fox Cities community members. Please contact info@foxcitiesbookfestival.org for more information.
Finally, please help us spread the word about this fall’s Festival. Please post, share, and tell your friends that the Fox Cities Book Festival is still on and we want them to attend!
Though the 2020 Festival will be one for the books (in more ways than one), we want to thank you for being a part of more than a decade of Fox Cities Book Festivals. See you this fall!
