Full 2023 Schedule

Ben McGrath, longtime staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote his debut book, Riverman, to tell the story of Dick Conant, a modern-day American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo along thousands of miles of the country’s rivers.

Sponsored by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Attend the open reception for illustrator Laura Freeman’s Framing History exhibition. The exhibition runs September 15 to October 14, 2023.

Sponsored by Hearne Fine Art/Pyramid Art, Books & Custom Framing and Clinton Presidential Center.

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One of the few events that has been around since the beginning of the Fest… This popular favorite features libations and literature shaken and stirred. What a mix! Limited open mic slots available.

Sponsored by Arkansas Times.

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Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency tells all the great stories of presidents and the sports they played, loved, and spectated. While every modern president has used sports to relate to Joe Q. Public, Power Players turns the lens around to examine how sports have shaped our presidents and made for some amazing moments in White House history.

Online reservations for this event have closed. We’ll try to accommodate walk-ins on a first-come, first-seated basis.

Known for his compelling stories, New Yorker writer and bestselling author David Grann has been called “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading,” with his book Killers of the Flower Moon coming to the big screen this fall,

In I’m an American by Darshana Khiani, with Laura Freeman’s exuberant illustrations, a classroom of children across many races, cultures, and origins explores the concept of Americanness as they each share bits of their family history and how their past has shaped their own personal American experience.

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Sponsored by Hearne Fine Art/Pyramid Art,

Author and filmmaker Julio Vincent Gambuto’s viral essay series “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting” sparked a worldwide conversation reaching over 21 million readers in 29 countries. Following up on the series, Gambuto’s debut book, Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!, offers a radical blueprint for how to fight back against the relentlessness of modern life,

Toast the Festival authors at this fête featuring hors d’oeuvres and libations. Geared for adults, the party will also have live music and books available for purchase.

Sponsored by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Pro Smart Printing.

Join CALS’s Deb Moore and the Writing Circle for an Exquisite Corpse activity, a collaborative game with origins in the Parisian Surrealist Movement. Drop in and add your unique sentence or phrase to an evolving piece of collaborative and creative writing. Breakfast treats, too!

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Come bake pie number one in the 50 Pies, 50 States journey with author Stacey Mei Yan Fong as she chats about all things American, pie, and, most of all, the friendships that made her decide to call this country her home. Limited seating. Get your ticket today!

BUY TICKET $15

Sponsored by Meaders Adams &

In A Most Tolerant Little Town, historian Rachel Louise Martin weaves together over a dozen perspectives to tell the forgotten story of the first school to attempt court-mandated desegregation in the wake of 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

In Monica Potts’s New York Times bestselling memoir The Forgotten Girls,

Arkansas author and columnist Eli Cranor’s second novel, Ozark Dogs, is a Southern noir thriller about a decades-old blood feud between two families in a small Arkansas town.

Michael X. Wang’s Lost in the Long March is an unflinching debut novel set against the backdrop of Mao’s Long March and its aftermath.

Whether you’re an aspiring writer or just interested in how the writing process works, don’t miss this unique opportunity to talk shop with Quinn Connor, author of Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves, and CALS’s Jasmine Jobe.

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Join VIETRI founder Susan Gravely as she prepares recipes and shares stories from her new memoir and cookbook, Italy on a Plate, a loving tribute to 40 years of Italian travels and friendships. Limited seating. Get your ticket today!

Sponsored by At Home in Arkansas.

BUY TICKET $15

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In the instant New York Times bestseller The Humanity Archive: Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth, Jermaine Fowler takes a sweeping survey of human history to show how Black humanity has been erased and relate how its recovery can save the humanity of us all.

In Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, Annie, Edward, and their daughter find a beautiful terrace hidden in the closet of their cramped apartment. But every bit of extra space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of the world.

Ben Purkert’s debut novel The Men Can’t Be Saved tackles a haunting question: What do our jobs do to our souls?

Regina Black’s The Art of Scandal is a steamy contemporary romance about a Black trophy wife who agrees to fake a perfect marriage for her cheating husband’s political campaign in exchange for a large divorce settlement but starts questioning her life choices when she falls for a handsome young artist.

In Nikki Payne’s debut novel Pride and Protest,

Share an hour with Sandra A. Gutierrez, acclaimed food journalist, professional cooking instructor, recipe developer, and author of Latinísimo: Home Recipes from the Twenty-One Countries of Latin America. Limited seating. Get your ticket today!

BUY TICKET $15

Sponsored by Boyette Strategic Advisors.

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Harrison Scott Key is the executive dean at Savannah College of Art and Design and is the author of three books, including The World’s Largest Man and Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, the inspiration for his TEDx talk, “The Funny Thing About the American Dream.” How to Stay Married tells the hilarious,

The deeply researched true-crime odyssey An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder tells the interlocking stories of the Oneida Community and its radical founder, John Humphrey Noyes; eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley; the gloomy, indecisive President James Garfield; and Garfield’s demented assassin, who was connected to all of them in surprising ways.

Exploring how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are inextricably bound to the places we call home, Karin Lin-Greenberg’s novel You Are Here is a keenly perceptive and deeply humane portrait of a community in transition.

Terah Shelton Harris’s debut novel One Summer in Savannah features a young poet who returns home to run her father’s bookstore and finds she must protect her gifted daughter—and herself—from the powerful family of the man who raped her,

In Elizabeth McKenzie’s slyly humorous novel The Dog of the North, Penny Rush has problems. But she is a virtuoso at what’s possible when all else fails. In Penny’s quest for a fresh start, there will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains,

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, Juliana Lamy’s You Were Watching from the Sand is a story collection written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s When Trying to Return Home is a dazzling debut short-story collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico,

Weaving together riveting research with the voices of survivors, Donovan X. Ramsey’s When Crack Was King is a crucial reevaluation of the crack epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

Erin Sharkey’s A Darker Wilderness is a vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.

Each pie in Fong’s 50 Pies, 50 States: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the United States through Pie is a whimsical tribute that encapsulates a state’s unique flavors and honors its culture. With recipes organized like the all-American road trip we’ve all wanted to complete, this book is a journey through the wonders of pie for bakers of all skill levels—and also the story of one extraordinary woman who chose to make this place her home.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, Better Living through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World tells the story of Christian Cooper’s extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him,

Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. In the Less sequel Less Is Lost, for Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis have Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him zigzagging across the country.

2024 Ballot

From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Ntozake Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the twentieth century.

2024 Ballot

Immediately following the Classic In Context noon discussion with Miller Williams prizewinning poet Shaina Phenix, we will screen Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of the Ntozake Shange book, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.

Sponsored by Dr. Elizabeth Fletcher Dishongh Charitable Trust.

To participate in the Traditional Pie Bake-Off and Recipe Swap Competition, entrants should be at The Root Café at 2:45PM with their best pie and copies of the recipe. Spectators should arrive at 3PM.

Monetary and other prizes will be awarded, and the restaurant will be open during the event as well. Special guest judge Stacey Mei Yan Fong,

The Ghost Variations is a collection of 100 very short stories about ghosts, hauntedness, and the afterlife. Brockmeier will be reading from new work.

Sponsored by Windstream.

For more information about this event, or the Six Bridges Book Festival, please call 501-918-3000.

For more than twenty years, Maureen Corrigan has been the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. She is also a columnist for the Washington Post as well as the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University, where her courses are very popular and her lectures have been described as “brilliant,” “hilarious,” “passionate,” and “eloquent.” She is the author of Leave Me Alone,