About the Festival
Each year in May thousands of book lovers, readers, writers, publishers, academics, and scholars converge on downtown Greensboro for the annual Greensboro Bound Literary Festival. We create a space for readers and writers to come together and share stories and experiences. We hope that by providing a platform for dialogue and discussion we can create a better understanding of and empathy for the human condition. The authors and topics presented at Greensboro Bound span a broad swath of interests and subject matter, including the LGBTQ experience, speculative fiction, immigrant narratives, social justice, memoir, and romance… just to name a few. Our author panels and discussions are complimented by workshops with visiting and local authors, documentary showings, and musical performances.
Greensboro Bound brought more than 175 authors to Greensboro in its first two years, with another 50+ that were slated to appear in May 2020 before the festival had to be cancelled due to COVID-19. We “went virtual” for our 2021 Festival and presented 50 authors in 23 conversations and two workshops in our most diverse representation yet with 21 authors of color, 28 women writers, and three non-binary writers. In 2018 and 2019 combined, 7,000 people attended the Festival.
We’ve hosted the likes of:
- Amor Towles
- Jason Mott, 2021 National Book Award winner
- Nikole Hannah-Jones
- Roxane Gay
- Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate
- Sharon Salzberg
- David Zucchino, Pulitzer Prize winner
- Nikki Giovanni
- Zadie Smith
- Daniel Pink
- Ani DiFranco
- Rhiannon Gidden, multi Grammy Award winner and MacArthur Fellow
- Carmen Maria Machado, National Book Award Finalist
- Kevin C. Powers, National Book Award Finalist
- Rebecca Makkai, National Book Award Finalist
- Lee Smith
- Fred Chappell
- John Shelton Reed
Children’s and YA authors:
- Alicia D. Williams, Newberry Award Winner
- Kelly Starling Lyons, Caldecott Award Winner for Illustrator Daniel Minter
- Lamar Giles, Edgard Award Winner
- Bill Konigsberg, Stonewall Award Winner
- Stacy McAnulty
- Alan Gratz