by Jude Mead

Have your Covid-19 proof of vaccination ready because you won’t want to miss the lineup of authors at this year’s Haystack Book Festival in Norfolk. The festival was canceled last year because of the pandemic. This year it will follow the state and CDC guidelines and will be live in-person, with proof of vaccination and masks required. Seating will be limited, with only 60 seats available at the Norfolk Library, and an additional 25 seats at the Norfolk Hub for large screen viewing. The festival will also be live streamed. 

Organizer Michael Selleck describes a book festival as an event that celebrates writers, books and literacy. “Bringing authors to Norfolk gives people an opportunity to connect with them through conversation in one place.”

Selleck said it takes the effort of the entire committee to pull off the festival. “It is important to have a dedicated group of people on the planning committee, and we have that. We all meet early on in the year and come together with ideas. We then prioritize the ideas and contact publishers and authors to see who can come.” 

Selleck has been with the festival since 2018. “I was asked to help with communications because I have a background in publishing. I have stayed on ever since. Today we hold the festival at the Norfolk Library, but our inaugural year was held at the Battell Chapel in town. It was very successful,” he said. This year he expects the same.

Selleck admits planning something of this caliber during a pandemic can be challenging. “This is still a difficult time, and we have to deal with Covid-19 and the variants. We are going to be very strict about proof of vaccine and masks. Even if we know the person, if they don’t have the proof, then they will not be able to attend.”

According to Selleck, after the planning stage comes the recruiting of presenters. This takes time because phone calls have to be made to publishers, author’s schedules need to be checked, dates and times must be set up and speakers secured. Once this is all locked in, it is on to the next step, promoting the festival. 

One important part of the Haystack Book Festival is the Brendan Gill Lecture. Gill wrote for The New Yorker for more than 50 years and was a longtime Norfolk resident. “There used to be an annual speaker every year to honor Brendan Gill. We brought it back to kick off the festival. Supporting new authors is a focus for the Gill lecture,” said Selleck.

The Brendon Gill Lecture begins on Friday at 6 p.m. with author Robert Jones Jr. Jones will discuss his debut novel, “The Prophet,” which explores the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation. Jones has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Essence and The Paris Review. He is also the creator and curator of the social justice media community Son of Baldwin. 

On Saturday morning at 10 a.m. the festival continues with a segment called “Freedom in Black and White.” Tyler Stovall, author of “White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea,” and Manisha Sinha, the author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” will talk together in an unmoderated conversation. Stovall is dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University. Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At noon, in a session titled “A Soul Admitted to Itself—Solitude, Sociability, and Poetry,” Fenton Johnson, author of “At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life,” will engage in a conversation with Margaret Gibson, the Connecticut state poet laureate. Johnson is a professor at the University of Arizona and serves on the faculty of the creative writing program of Spalding University. Gibson is the author of several collections of poetry and a professor at the University of Connecticut.

The last session of the day, which begins at 2:30 p.m., is called “The Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things.” The three presenters are Dinah Lenney, Kim Adrian and Matthew Battles, all authors of mini-books in the Object Lessons series published by Bloomsbury. Lenney is the author the book “Coffee” in the series, Adrian the author of “Sock” and Battles the author of “Tree.”

Sunday will begin with a morning bird walk at Dennis Hill with Eileen Fielding, from the Sharon Audubon Society. At 1 p.m. the well-known ornithologist David Allen Sibley will conclude the festival with a virtual lecture on his book “What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why.” Sibley is the author and illustrator of The Sibley Guide to Birds and the recipient of the Roger Tory Peterson Award for lifetime achievement from the American Birding Association. 

The Haystack Book Festival will take place at the Norfolk Library from Friday, Oct. 1, to Sunday, Oct. 3. Autographed books will be available for purchase, with additional autographed copies available afterward for those who could not attend. Visit norfolkfoundation.net/book-talks for the full press release and registration information; registration will go live on Sept.1. The Haystack Book Festival is free and open to the public.