The Inaugural Bloomington Book Festival launches Tuesday

By Alex Chambers

Published October 25, 2024 at 8:55 PM EDT

The Bloomington Book Festival features writers from Bloomington and beyond

The Bloomington Book Festival runs Tuesday, October 29th through Saturday, November 2. It features two nights of keynotes. The Friday evening keynote begins with writer Michael Martone and is followed by a conversation between two poet-essayists: Ross Gay and Hanif Abdurraqib. Saturday evening is a conversation between writers Michael Koryta and Richard Chizmar. Other events include a panel on the “Life of A Book,” about the path a book takes to publication after it’s been written, writing classes, a local author book fair, and more. WFIU’s Alex Chambers sat down with founder Jenna Bowman to learn about how the festival got started. For more information, visit the Bloomington Book Festival’s website.

Alex Chambers

Alex Chambers runs WFIU’s arts desk, and produces and hosts WFIU’s Inner States, a weekly podcast and radio show about arts, culture, and ideas from southern Indiana and beyond. He’s the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about the present, produced in partnership with Indiana Humanities. He has a PhD in American Studies, with a dissertation called Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, and a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. In his spare time, he teaches audio storytelling at the IU Media School. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.

See stories by Alex Chambers