Vegas Valley Book Festival
November 6-8, 2008
The Vegas Valley Book Festival, which began in 2002, is a celebration of the written, spoken, and illustrated word that features over fifty invited authors participating in a full schedule of panel discussions, book signings, readings, workshops, poetry, children's literature, and special events.We are excited to welcome two internationally renowned authors to deliver the opening and closing keynote lectures. Neil Gaiman, who the Dictionary of Literary Biography calls one of the top ten living postmodern writers, will open the festival on Thursday November 6th. Gaiman is an award-winning author and New York Times bestseller whose works traverse multiple genres (prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama) and age-groups. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon will close the event with a lecture on Saturday November 8th. Chabon, acclaimed as one of the most significant authors in modern American fiction, is also known for his diverse publications having penned novels, screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
Festival organizers have announced that the main festival site will be the historic Fifth Street School in the heart of downtown Las Vegas. The 1930s mission style school is currently being renovated into a cultural complex, and will be the site of most of the author sessions and book signings. A local authors' fair will take place in the gallery area of the facility, and the adjacent Centennial Plaza will feature the Target Children's Book Festival. The Flamingo Library will host the all-day Comics Expo on Saturday, November 8. Spoken word and slam poetry events will take center stage at First Friday in the Arts District on November 7th.
The festival is sponsored by the City of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs, Nevada Humanities, Las Vegas Review Journal and the Clark County Library District. Other programming partners include the Black Mountain Institute, the UNLV School of Architecture Downtown Design Center and the UNLV Creative Writing Department.
Themes for the 2008 celebration include the bumpy road to getting your work published, self publishing, the conquest of the American west, environment, landscaping, gender and minorities in comics, architecture, and identity. Norm Clarke will discuss the popular scene in Las Vegas and Geoff Schumacher will disclose the many secrets of the Howard Hughes era in Las Vegas. Other contributors from Nevada include Donald Ravell, Brian Rouff, Claudia Keelan, Dayvid Figler, Steve Grogan, Jarret Keen, Matthew Coolidge, and Tod Goldberg.
Invited national writers include Hampton Sides and Sally Denton as well as poets Aaron Shurin, Pablo Medina, Mani Rao, Angela Ball, Rusty Morrison, April Ossmann, Derrick Brown, Saul Williams, and Maggie Estep.