A new book festival is launching next year in the San Francisco area called the Bay Area Book Festival.
Headed up by Cherilyn Parsons, the former director of development and strategic initiatives at the Center for Investigative Reporting, the festival will have a wide scope with content from Nobel laureate writers and the National Book Award winners to popular genre writers including science fiction and fantasy and romance authors. The festival will take place in the East Bay and all of the events will be located nearby so that attendees can walk.
Parsons told SF Gate that she expects the event to draw 100,000 attendees. “Other cities around the world have big public, weekend, free book festivals that cover all different kinds of writing,” Parsons explained to the paper. “But the Bay Area, strangely, despite being a literary mecca, doesn’t have one of these. So I thought, it’s time someone starts one.”