Prelude To A Festival

“At the still point, there the dance is.” —T. S. Eliot

I haven’t introduced myself yet. I’m Deonna Kelli Sayed, the Festival Coordinator for Greensboro Bound. You may have seen me around downtown, or at the 2018 TEDx Greensboro, or behind the registration desk at a North Carolina Writers’ Network event.

I’m thrilled to meet you, and I’m glad you’re #GreensboroBound.

The T.S. Eliot quote above is considered to be one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. At least, that’s what the Internet says. The Internet is known to be wrong, on occasion.

The sentiment expressed in the sentence, however, beautifully captures the muffled fury of A Prelude to a Festival: the four months prior to Greensboro Bound where our organizing machines quietly churn to deliver what will become four days of free programming during May 16-19, 2019.

Things may look still to you, but I assure you, things are anything but.

To plan a literary festival is a frenzy, at times. A joy! A clumsy dance! After all, we’re writers. We don’t know much about dancing.

To make a festival happen, it requires a troupe of donors, volunteers, community partners (like UNCG University Libraries), the City of Greensboro, lovers of cheese straws (more on that in a minute), an independent bookstore (Scuppernong Books), authors and readers who are enthusiastic to attend.

To make a festival happen takes blind faith, dumb luck, and nine months of honest work.

In the Beginning…

The very first Greensboro Bound meeting occurred in late 2017 over cheese straws and wine. A group of dedicated folks gathered and issued two very important edicts:

• Greensboro was getting a literary festival, dammit!
• Cheese Straws would henceforth be the official food of said festival.

(Perhaps the reader is unfamiliar with the Southern Cheese Straw. Again, the Internet offers its wisdom.)

A nonprofit, Greensboro Literary Organization (GLO) was formed. In less than nine months, we raised more than $120,000 and gathered together 80 authors, 5000 readers, and a few llamas for the May festival. Just so you know, a llama pooped in the library, much to the delight of the children. Every author received homemade Cheese Straws.

At Greensboro Bound, we take our edicts very seriously.

In the Fall of 2018, we curated a series, Immigration Stories, partially funded by support from the NC Humanities Council.  Another Greensboro Bound series, This Is Your Country On Drugs, featured Beth Macy, who also spoke during the 2018 festival. Greensboro Bound’s Authors Engaging Students program put authors in front of almost 6000 public school students in Guilford County, and we donated 500 books to classrooms and elementary school libraries. 

Listen, we weren’t kidding when we first huddled over cheese straws and declared that we wanted to organize literary stuff.

And now…

#GreensboroBound19 is happening. The official author reveal will drop during the first week in March. What I can share now: Zadie Smith is scheduled to deliver the Saturday night Keynote Address. Her presence at the festival is in partnership with the University of North Carolina Greensboro Libraries. Fred Chappell will perform with puppets, and young readers will enjoy interactive programming with Children and Young Adult authors.

As we enter our sophomore festival year, it’s time to introduce the motley assortment of writers and community-based individuals behind Greensboro Bound.

Author Hospitality and Green Room
• Ashley Sharkey | Greensboro Literary Organization Board
•Dabney Sanders | Greensboro Literary Organization Board | Project Manager at Downtown Greenway (Dabney is the maker of cheese straws, by the way.)

Author Engagement and Adult Programming Committee
• Dr. Gale Greenlee | Scholar on Black and Latinx girlhood and social change in Kids/YA literature
• Steve Mitchell | Author | Bookseller & Co-owner of Scuppernong Books
• Julia Ridley Smith | Author | University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Children and YA Programming Committee
• Cathy Bentsen | Retired Media Specialist with the Guilford County Public Schools
• Steve Colyer | Greensboro Literary Organization Board Member
• Dr. Gale Greenlee | Scholar on Black and Latinx girlhood and social change in Kids/YA literature
• Shannon Purdy Jones | Mom to Penny and Dominique | Bookseller at Scuppernong Books

Fundraising and Donation Relations
• Ashley Sharkey | Greensboro Literary Organization Board Member
• Cheryl Kersky | Experienced Fundraiser
• Dabney Sanders | Greensboro Literary Organization Board | Project Manager at Downtown Greenway
• Ellen Fisher | Children’s Author | Greensboro Bound’s Author Engaging Students Program
• Steve Colyer | Greensboro Literary Organization Board Member

Location Committee
• Glenn Perkins | Curator of Community History | Greensboro History Museum
• Andrew Saulters | Author | Owner & Publisher at Unicorn Press
• Marcia Woodward | Volunteer Extraordinaire for all sorts of Greensboro events

Vendor Liaison
• Wilson Lester | Greensboro Literary Organization Board Member | Executive Director of the Greensboro Community Development Fund

Volunteer Coordinator
• Paula Pierce | Board of Directors of Downtown Greensboro Incorporated

Prelude to Magic

I recall a subtle moment during last year’s festival. It was Saturday night when it felt too late to be called evening, but it wasn’t quite ready to become morning. The air, humid. A drizzle had colored the streets with a metallic sheen. A festival author stood on a Greensboro sidewalk and open her arms wide before she bellowed:

“I declare this city to be something grand!”

She put her arms down, hugged me, then said, “I love Greensboro!”
.
Her enthusiasm captured what many at Greensboro Bound felt during the festival weekend: the air seemed somehow changed, like the presence of writers had altered the cosmic alignment of downtown.

The volunteers listed above, as well as many others not yet named, will again turn downtown into something otherworldly during that third weekend in May. We hope to organize four days full of literary wonderment and awe. We hope that you, the reader, will be part of the magic.

Here’s to all the cheese straws we could possible eat between now and then.

See you soon.

Here’s some authors and audience members from last year: Carmen Maria Machado, Dan Pink, Nikki Giovanni, Lee Smith, audience members and lunchtime opera.

 

Author Dan Pink is Greensboro Bound

Author Daniel Pink is Greensboro Bound

Daniel Pink is the New York Times best-selling author of sic books, including Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us and To Sell is Human. His newest, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, was on the New York Times Bestseller List within a week of its release.

Pink was host and co-executive producer of Crowd Control, a television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel. He also appears on NPR’s Hidden Brain and the PBS NewsHour. He’s a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired and a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph.

Thinkers 50 (link) has named him one of the top 15 business thinkers in the world. Pink’s TED talk (link) on motivation is one of the 10 most-watched TED talks of all time, with over 19 million views.

Daniel Pink writes at the cutting edge of science and business, delving deep into research and mining data for insights on how human feel, think, and interact with each other. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink explores and explains a wealth of research and studies into the ‘when’ of things. “We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what,” he writes. He’s here to correct that.

For instance, exercise is best done in the morning if we want to lose weight and boost our mood for the day, Pink says, but those who want to perform at their physical peak, should put it off until the afternoon. (A disproportionate number of Olympic records are set in the afternoon, for instance.)

When is the best time to have surgery, to get married? How does our mood effect our decision making and how does that mood ebb and flow throughout the day? And, when is the best time for important conversations with employees or investors? This book provides data, case studies, and personal observation to explore how we can make the ‘when of our lives work to our advantage. There’s more in The Washington Post.

“Perhaps we find it simply too hard to believe that our thoughts and actions are really so vulnerable to the time of day. Mercifully, Mr. Pink delivers the bad news about our time-based weaknesses with some good news about how to compensate for them,” Emily Bobrow writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Daniel Pink will speak at 7pm on Friday, May 18 as part of the Greensboro Bound Book Festival.

 

 

 

 

Why Festivals Matter

by Brian Lampkin

I spent Saturday night out in the streets. The 2017 National Folk Festival filled downtown Greensboro with thousands of humans, and these thousands of humans seemed to be in various states of ecstasy. I suppose drugs may have been involved, but I suspect that this communal ecstasy had more to do with something less tangible.

A festival creates a community; or, a festival depends upon a community. It’s a chicken/egg thing, but you can’t have one without the other. A festival creates its own energy. That energy can go in many different directions–crowds are unpredictable and the unleashed energy of the mob (e.g., Charlottesville’s unhinged collection of white supremacists) is an omnipresent possibility–but the undeniable joy and camaraderie wafting through the air of the Folk Festival kept the darker forces deeply buried. This was downtown Greensboro alive with music and dancing and food and friendship.

Imagine the Tuvan Throat Singers in concert at LeBauer Park without the Folk Festival. Instead of a standing-room only crowd of 1,000 or more, you might have had a smattering of devotees and a few adventurers in musical diversity, perhaps 50 people in all. But a festival creates its own energy, and suddenly the Tuvan Throat Singers are adored by a uniquely attentive mass of festival-goers thrilled by the succession of pleasing sounds emanating from somewhere deep within the vocal cavities of three men previously unknown to nearly everyone in the audience.

The Greensboro Bound Literary Festival will also create its own energy. It will capture the literary dynamism already present in the Gate City and explode it into a weekend of writers meeting readers, writers meeting other writers, ideas meeting counterpoints, and downtown Greensboro once again meeting its city. Cities themselves are experiments in community, and a well-run adventurous festival can be an example of why cities are thrilling, meaningful, necessary.

It was an uncommon feeling on the streets of Greensboro Saturday night. Music was certainly at the center of it all, as literature will be for our festival, but something else happens in the crowd of an arts festival that changes a city, at least temporarily. We were transformed into a community. We need these periodic transformations, and let’s hope that we can make Greensboro Bound into another moment when Greensboro looks and feels different than it did the day before.

Top 6 Reasons You Should Volunteer for Greensboro Bound

 

History will happen next May when authors and poets (and who knows what else) converge downtown to celebrate writing and all things related. This kind of history needs to be a people’s history.

We need you to make it happen.

Greensboro Bound will host its first volunteer meeting at 7 pm on September 13th at Scuppernong Books. This initial gathering is a meet-n-greet to hear about where we are in the festival’s progress and how you can contribute to the cause. To learn more, click here. To go ahead and sign up, click here!

Greensboro Bound needs volunteers before, during, and after the festival. We need people to be room attendants, to escort authors, help set-up and break down event spaces before and after. We need help with smaller events between now and the festival. We need volunteers at Greensboro Bound informational tables during First Fridays. We need an array of talents and resources!

We need anybody who will look great in a Greensboro Bound t-shirt, and that is everybody.

Still not convinced you belong? Let me give you a few more reasons:

1. Nothing quite like this has ever happened in Greensboro. You can brag to everybody that you’re part of it.

Imagine a Greensboro Bound logo on her hat. See? THIS COULD BE YOU.

2. You know you’ve always wanted to spend a weekend with a bunch of writers.

3. A literary festival can’t happen without cool people, and volunteers are the coolest people.

4. People who read books are interesting. This is a great way to meet the most interesting people in the world.

5. North Carolina is the Writingest State, but Greensboro is probably the most writingest city in N.C. You can’t throw a rock down Elm Street without hitting a writer. That’s something worth celebrating!

6. Greensboro Bound is a celebration of people and ideas, and one we hope will bring book lovers in from the region. North Carolina is an amazing place for writers and for people who love reading. Even John Green fans know this to be true. Show some love for this state and for your city: volunteer to be the heartbeat of Greensboro Bound.

 

One City, One Book 2017

By Gale Greenlee

Here at Greensboro Bound, we’re not just building a festival, we’re building community. And when something awesome involving books is happening in Greensboro, we want to share that news.

Every two years, the Greensboro Public Library brings people together with its community-wide reading initiative known as One City, One Book (OCOB). The premise is simple: the Library chooses a book and challenges as many residents as possible to read and talk about it. For more than two months, people gather in schools and libraries, in parks and homes, and on the streets. And on Saturday, August 26, we hope the streets will be buzzing as the Library launches its 8th OCOB with a celebratory block party.

For the first time in OCOB’s history, the Greensboro community helped choose the book. After a selection committee whittled down the options, hundreds of community members weighed in and voted. The winner? Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. The book schools us on the invaluable contributions black female mathematicians made to NASA’s space program, all while living in the midst of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Cold War.

Maybe you already know about these awe-inspiring women called “human computers.” The book made the New York Times bestseller list, after all. Maybe you’ve seen the Oscar-nominated movie starring Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Taraji P. Henson – who, for the record, entered college as an engineering major at N.C. A&T (Aggie Pride!). Or maybe you’ve heard about Greensboro’s many connections to Hidden Figures; the real-life daughter of Henson’s character calls the Gate City her home, and many of NASA’s early female recruits came from what’s now UNCG. Whatever the case, here’s your chance to read the book, see the blockbuster film at LeBauer Park, and participate in important conversations about civil rights, racial and gender justice, and persistent inequities in STEM fields, our nation, and our community.

Book discussions (a.k.a. real talk about real issues) ground the project. But in true OCOB fashion, the line-up also includes family-friendly, fun events and programs that move beyond the book. There will be rocket launches and drone demos, vintage fashion shows, live radio broadcasts, and old school Sci-Fi films. You can try your hand at some kitchen chemistry or explore coding. Meet some of Greensboro’s own “hidden figures,” like members of local immigrant and refugee communities, or women entrepreneurs working in holistic therapy, yoga, and personal care. Learn about “hidden epidemics” like domestic violence or “hidden issues” like those affecting individuals with disabilities.

OCOB is about a book, but it’s about much more. So read the book and join the conversation. Be a part of the community.

For a complete calendar of One City, One Book programs, including Margot Lee Shetterly’s September 28 visit, click here.

Emerging writers getting Bound

I am fascinated with words. I am fascinated by people. A literary Festival in Greensboro would let us celebrate both, at the same time, in one place, together. To me, this is not just amazing, but why writing and the telling of stories and exchanging of ideas exists in the first place. While books have transformed me many Sunday afternoons on my couch alone, I look forward to being around others who read like their next answer sits in the pages of someone’s book, somewhere.

Michael Thomas, A&T student, writer