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The sixteenth annual Newburyport Literary Festival (NLF) will take place as a live, online streaming event April 23 – April 25, 2021. The festival will once again partner with A Mighty Blaze, a social media initiative created by authors Jenna Blum and Caroline Leavitt to help promote other authors’ new books during the continued COVID-19 pandemic, to bring this year’s events to the public.

Festival organizers are taking advantage of the online format to feature authors from Newburyport and around the world, from Ann Patchett, who will participate from her home in Tennessee and Kim Johnson, who will ring in from Oregon, to Ruth Ware, Elly Griffiths and Dorothy Koomson who will all join from the UK. Other featured authors and poets include Mateo Askaripour, Fiona Davis, Peter Guralnick, Elizabeth Holmes, Nancy Johnson, Lily King, Kate Clifford Larson, Linda Pastan, Dani Shapiro, Phuc Tran and Natasha Trethewey.

The festival kicks off with a virtual Opening Ceremony on Friday, April 23, 6:00 p.m. featuring poet Deborah Warren in conversation with poet Ernest Hilbert. On Saturday, April 24, events will begin at 8:30 a.m. with a virtual Coffee with the Poets and conclude with a special Saturday evening performance of a melopoeia at 7:00 p.m. This stirring combination of music and poetry will feature poets Rhina Espaillat and Alfred Nicol, guitarist John Tavano and cellist Roger Kimball. Sunday’s events run from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sessions on both days will be approximately 45 minutes to one hour, including time for questions and answers. The festival is free but registration is required for each event.

Official bookstores of the event are Jabberwocky Bookshop and The Book Shop of Beverly Farms. Books purchased online or by phone from Jabberwocky Bookshop will be shipped free of charge to anywhere on the east coast. For more information, visit https://www.jabberwockybookshop.com/. Prior to and during the Festival, The Book Shop of Beverly Farms will donate 10% of the proceeds from sales of featured authors’ books to BINC (Book Industry Charitable Foundation). For more information or to purchase a book, please visit https://bookshopofbeverlyfarms.com/?q=p.newburyport_lit.

For a complete list of authors and to register for events, please visit the festival website, newburyportliteraryfestival.org, or Facebook account, www.facebook.com/NewburyportLitFest.

The NLF is made possible through the generosity of their founding sponsors, the Newburyport Bank and the Institution for Savings. Additional support is provided by the Massachusetts Local Cultural Councils in Newburyport, Newbury and West Newbury.

The Newburyport Literary Festival (NLF), organized by the Newburyport Literary Association, annually celebrates reading and the love of books. For more information about the 2021 NLF, including authors and their work, please visit http://newburyportliteraryfestival.org

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