The Farmington Author & Book Festival (FAB) celebrates the diversity of Michigan’s stories and storytellers and is a collaboration between KickstART Farmington and the Farmington Community Library. FAB Fest takes place on June 1st, 2024, during Art on the Grand in Memorial Park near the Masonic Hall in downtown Farmington (33430 Grand River Ave, Farmington, MI 48335). The festival features author readings, book signings, discussions, workshops, and more, along with a book marketplace offering publications by over fifty area authors and publishers.
FAB Fest is generously sponsored by the Farmington Friends of the Library and The MacGuffin, a national literary journal produced at Schoolcraft College.
Book Beat is a vendor at this festival and will be providing books on-site. Read more about FAB Fest here.
Don J. Usner. Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts
Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.
A multiple Pushcart Nominee, Joy’s work has won numerous awards and is published in over 100 literary magazines and journals including Poetica, Ekphrasis, Poetry East, The Kentucky Review, RATTLE, The Patterson Review, and others. Her work is also included in the stunning anthology, Michigan in Poetry in Michigan, and, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Jewish American Poetry.
Photo by Insa Keilbach
Keith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter.
Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a rotating ensemble of artists. Her work crosses and combines genres, and her books have won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film and performance. She is based in Detroit and thinks globally.
Stephen Mack Jones is a published poet, award-winning playwright and winner of the Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship. Stephen has received many accolades for his August Snow crime/thriller series. August Snow won the Nero Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and a finalist for the Shamus Award as well as the Strand Critics Award. August Snow was named a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. He received that honor again for Dead of Winter. In 2018, the International Association of Crime Writers presented Stephen with the prestigious Hammett Prize for literary excellence in the field of crime writing. He currently lives in the suburbs of Detroit.
2024 FAB Fest Schedule
11:00-11:45 am: Children’s Book Readings with authors Molly David (My Mischievous Wheelchair), Martha Johnston (Iki and his Mighty Friends), Jeffrey Roy Ford (Steadman Squirrel).
1:00-1:45 pm: The MacGuffin 40th Anniversary Reading
2:00-2:45 pm: A Conversation and Reading with Poets Joy Gaines-Friedler and Keith Taylor
3:00-3:45 pm: Romance Writers Roundtable, featuring D.A. Henneman, Isabelle Drake, and Natalie Dunbar, hosted by Rebecca Brown
4:00-4:45 pm: Author Reading with Award-Winning Writers Kathe Koja & Stephen Mack Jones
5:00-6:30 pm: Keynote Presentation/Reading and Conversation with Carolyn Forché
7:00-9:00 pm: Afterparty at KickstART Gallery