Greensboro’s popular book festival returns this weekend—but this year, it looks a little different.
The event, founded in 2017 by Steve Colyer with Scuppernong Books owners Brian Lampkin, Steve Mitchell, and Deb and Dave White, draws book lovers to the Gate City each year.
This year’s Greensboro Bound Book Festival—formerly the multi-day Greensboro Bound Literary Festival—will feature most of its events on Saturday, May 17.
To learn more, the Thread spoke to Angel Rippy, the festival coordinator for Greensboro Bound.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about your background.
I used to run a bookstore in High Point, Sunrise Books. That was me. So I’ve known Steve and Brian a long time. And in the past, I’ve had a table at the festival selling stuff. I came on as festival coordinator in December.
What is Greensboro Bound?
Our first festival was in 2018. Our mission, which just changed and is on our website, is that we want to bring readers and writers together, to make reading cool. We want readers to find each other to talk about important things. We have had some really heavy subjects in the past and have a couple this year, too. But we want to make it something for everyone. We ultimately want to make Greensboro a place that’s known for literature.
What’s different about this year’s festival?
The biggest difference this year is that it’s basically one day, so there’s not a lot of things that overlap. We’re trying to make it where you can catch a lot of stuff, and you don’t have to choose which events to go to. It’s more compact. All of the events will be on two floors of the Greensboro Cultural Arts Center, plus the library across the street and the historical museum.
We, of course, encourage people to go to Scuppernong Books, but we will be selling books at the events as well.
This year we have fewer authors. Last year we had maybe 50; this year it’s 20-something.
Why is that?
It was partly by choice to make it easier to navigate. One of the complaints I had when I wasn’t working the festival was that it’s too hard, too complicated. There were so many venues and so many times. But also, because I only came on in December, we also realized that we didn’t have a lot of time. So there was a time issue.
Tell me about some of the main events this year.
Well, Percival Everett is a huge get for us. We’re partnering with UNCG Libraries for that event. One of the great things about Greensboro is that we have great partners, so we can pull people like Percival Everett. New this year is that we’ve also coordinated with O. Henry Magazine to do the writers workshop. One of the events that I’m really excited about is the one with Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Their book, Happy Land, is about a real place in Western NC where freed slaves bought land and set up a utopian community out there.
There’s also the event with Lee Hawkins and Aran Shetterley about how the past is not the past and about historical racism.
For me, it’s been a fun learning experience to see who’s out there and who wants to come to Greensboro and see who wants to be in conversation. We don’t do just straight-up book talks, we try to have authors in conversation with one another.
In Winston-Salem, they have the Bookmarks Festival, which has been going on longer than Greensboro Bound. Tell me how you differentiate yourselves from other festivals.
I think we tackle some tougher issues. We also try to not have the same people they do out of professional courtesy; it’s not a competition. We also don’t just have local authors. It’s not just about Greensboro, but we do have a great writing community to draw from. So we try to make it in Greensboro, but not about Greensboro.
Talk to me about those tough subjects.
This year is a little different because of the time constraints that we had. We have no overall theme, but we have the talk with Lee Hawkins and Arrin Shetterley. That will be a tough subject covering race and the traumas from the past that are still happening to people today. Hopefully, it will be interesting and get people talking. That’s the thing. We want people to talk about tough issues.
Then there’s a conversation with Chris Cooper, a political scientist, with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, who will talk about social economics and race and how that makes or contributes to NC being a purple state.
With the Trump administration, lots of institutions have rolled back their DEI efforts. Tell me about how Greensboro Bound has reacted to that trend.
We were planning the festival during the in-between time. We didn’t know what would happen between November and January. A big part of the event is the diversity of the authors that we bring in. Even though we would love to diversify our attendance more than it is, it’s always a thought: Do we have anyone who doesn’t look like me? Because middle-aged white ladies love book festivals. But our board is quite diverse and we don’t shy around from those tough subjects.
Why is a book festival like Greensboro Bound important?
It is important because we don’t have a lot of third spaces in our lives. We need a place where you will see people who have different ideas, who don’t look like you. A book festival teaches us that that’s possible, that we can all come out and get along fine and learn from each other. I think that some of the most important things that happen are the conversations afterwards, more than the book festival itself. Those help us in thinking in a new way. It makes literature important in a way more than just reading; it’s a celebration of books.
Learn more about the festival, including the schedule of events, here.
Sayaka Matsuoka is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly. She was formerly the managing editor for Triad City Beat.
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