Book lovers in Lansing have an event this weekend to celebrate their passion for reading. Local booksellers have joined forces to create the first-ever Lansing Literary Festival.
Few things bring greater pleasure to readers that riffling through an old favorite book or a new title, and that’s the focus of the Lansing Lit Festival (that’s lit as in literature, as well as lit as in exciting).
Local booksellers have worked together on events like bookstore crawls before this. Now, Hooked bookstore co-owner Sarah Reckhow says this three-day festival will bump things up a notch. “The goal is to take this to the next level,” she explains, “with a lot more author events, performances, poetry, and really to highlight the fact that we have a burgeoning literary and book scene here in Lansing, with a lot of independent bookstores and the institutions like MSU, LCC, and the libraries, featuring great resources for folks who love to read and want to meet authors.”
About a dozen bookstores and libraries are holding events over the weekend. Reckhow says the schedule has been designed to appeal to a wide range of readers. There will be poetry, comics, graphic novels, and things the kids will enjoy.
Highlights include a poetry program Friday night in Dart Auditorium at Lansing Community College; an appearance by Nicole Lintemuth discussing her book This Book Is Dangerous at Wayfaring Books Saturday; and a session on drawing your own comics on Sunday at EVERYbody Reads. Sunday starts national Banned Books Week, and a number of events will focus on the freedom to read and having access to books.
Reckhow says she’s seeing a couple of trends in the Lansing bookselling market. “One of the most popular things is ‘romantasy’,” she continues, “this kind of exploding new genre that combines romance and fantasy; the distinctly Michigan books; one thing we love is how the Library of Michigan selects these Michigan books; and then, when we have authors in.”
Lansing might not have a big city reputation of having a thriving book scene. For Reckhow, the festival is a way of shining a spotlight on what the city has to offer, and encouraging people to visit stores they’ve never been in. “We want to draw attention to the fact that Lansing…yeah, maybe sometimes it’s a grittier city or has a different reputation, but that the local bookstore scene and what’s happening here is actually really exciting.”
The Lansing Lit Festival starts at 5 p.m. Friday at Hooked with author and political analyst Matt Grossman discussing his new book Polarized By Degrees. Grossman is Reckhow’s husband and business partner at Hooked. The weekend-long bookstore crawl ends Sunday with a totebag, while supplies last, for people who visit all the participating stores over the weekend.
