Emerson Faculty, Alums Take Stages at Boston Book Fest

Emerson faculty and alums are once again lending their insights to the Boston Book Festival by serving as panelists, moderators, and interviewers.

The Boston Book Festival, taking place Saturday, Oct. 26, at locations across Copley Square, will feature more than 200 authors and moderators, and offer more than 70 sessions, along with a street fair, live music, and food.

Emersonians taking part include:

Jared Bowen ’98, Emmy Award-winning Executive Arts Editor and host of WGBH’s The Culture Show, will moderate the Art History Keynote: Paris in Ruins, with Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee.

Ciera Burch, MFA ’20, author of Something Kindred and Out of Step, into You, will be a panelist on Turn Back Now!, “a series of chilling tales where the past and present collide, dark secrets are revealed, and courage is tested.”  

Poet, translator, and editor Danielle Legros Georges ’86, LHD ’16, Boston’s second Poet Laureate, will discuss with writer, translator, and activist Marie-Célie Agnant the work in the newly released Blue Flare: Haitian Women Poets of the Now.

Charles Wesley Emerson Professor and biographer Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, will moderate the panel Foundational American Stories, featuring writers who “tell America’s origin stories by examining the histories of specific families.”

Rebecca Podos, MFA ’12, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of YA and adult novels, including Furious, a YA romance co-written with Jamie Pacton, will moderate Magic to Save, Magic to Shatter, a panel that explores three new books featuring young magical protagonists.

Poet Anna V.Q. Ross, who teaches in the Emerson Prison Initiative, and whose most recent book, Flutter, Kick, was named a 2023 Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library, will participate in Poetry as a Radical Act, because “to think, write, and be fully engaged with the world around us in ways that matter is nothing less than a radical act of survival.”  

Shuchi Saraswat, MFA ’09, Senior Editor of the literary magazine AGNI, will interview Colombe Schneck, author of Swimming in Paris, an examination of the complicated relationships women often have with their own bodies.

And Distinguished Professor Jerald Walker, author of National Book Award finalist How to Make a Slave and Other Essays and the newly released Magically Black and Other Essays, will join a panel of three memoirists called Memoir: Creating Identity.