Washington library to hold Authorfest

WASHINGTON — The Washington Public Library will welcome a handful of local writers to an Authorfest on Saturday, where they will read excerpts, sell and sign copies of their books, and attend a luncheon.

“We wanted to highlight our independent authors in our community,” Assistant Librarian LeAnn Kunz said. “There’s so many people around that are writing, and writing pretty darn good stuff. So we wanted to give them a chance to showcase their work.”

Many are members of the library’s writers workshop, a factor that helped streamline the affair’s coordination.

“It wasn’t hard to find seven, really, and we’ve got some others on the back burner that hopefully we will be able to do this again next year and feature some more,” Kunz said. “And they’re all genres. We’ve got poetry, we’ve got non-fiction writers, we’ve got novel writers, we’ve got a little bit of everything.”

Library staff also will hold a brief presentation on BiblioBoard, a database patrons can use for free that helps writers publish their own works, and share them with the library if they so choose.

Kunz said the program — a somewhat new addition to the library’s list of benefits — would likely appeal to many in the audience.

“We’re expecting that there will be people who come that are curious about how these authors became independent authors and how they published their books, that’s often a question at the writer’s workshop,” she said. “We feel like there’s probably going to be some curiosity of people … that was partly our incentive as a library to get BiblioBoard, hearing that from our writers workshop participants, that they would like to maybe publish something.”

That said, the event isn’t only intended for prospective authors.

“We want people who just enjoy reading in general to come,” Kunz said. “A lot of people are going to know the local authors just because that’s their neighbor, or someone they’ve always known in the community.”

“It’s a busy weekend again in Washington, but we hope people will stop in, and they can come and go … we’re kind of hoping all day long that there will be people coming and going.”

The schedule for the day is:

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