Salt Lake Book Festival Fills the Sundance Void

Salt Lake City is launching its first-ever citywide book festival on Oct. 17, and the timing couldn’t be better. As many Utahns reel from our loss of the Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake Book Festival Director Amanda Warren and her team are paving the way to uphold and elevate our city’s cultural relevance.

“It’s a community event,” Warren says, adding that the festival will have nearly fifty vendors on board, including artists, florists and poets as well as food trucks and pop-up coffee shops. Vice Chair Adam Ickowicz adds that Fisher Brewing will be sponsoring the festival with a custom beer. “Yeah,” Warren says, brimming. “Fisher’s the homie.”

But rest assured, the festival will cater to all ages. “We’ll have storytime all day,” says Board Member Ashley Pinales, and Warren adds that the kiddos can also look forward to things like face painting, puppet shows – and even a Dogman appearance. “We want diversity in all things, including age,” Warren says, adding that books are an easy medium to connect over, regardless of your background.

Salt Lake is long overdue for an event like this, and the director behind the Salt Lake Book Festival is uniquely equipped to make this first year a smash-hit. Amanda Warren is the founder and Reader-in-Chief of Bookish, a viral book club that aims to make reading a social sport. She’s made it her mission to strip reading of all pretense and address the literacy crisis head-on.

“We have to teach the teens and tweens that reading is cool,” Warren says, and goes on to explain the festival’s close working relationship with Operation Literacy, the Utah-based nonprofit behind StoryCon. This is just one example of Warren’s ability to integrate the festival into the city’s existing landscape. It’s hard to find a square on the Salt Lake bingo card that’s not already marked by this book festival in some way, shape or form. Even the bureaucratic hall of mirrors we call the UTA is hosting a Read & Ride FrontRunner Train Takeover, in which attendees can pay ten bucks to read and make bookish friends on an evening ride to Provo and back.

“I think there’s something to be said about the culture Salt Lake offers,” Warren says. “We used to have the Outdoor Retailer — that passed. We used to have Sundance — and that left too…So what is our mainstay cultural institution that’s putting us on the map?” Warren and her team are passionate about this city and the amount of talent it has to offer. To them, hosting a citywide book festival that brings together local talent and national treasures alike is a natural evolution.

Pinales says, “I feel like Salt Lake City has arrived, or been relevant, for a while…There’s so much attention on Salt Lake. I mean, especially with the reality TV stuff, but I think what people forget is that there’s so much diversity. There are so many multicultural events here. There’s so much that Salt Lake has to offer — and it’s great to be able to showcase that in such a way that uplifts the community further.”

Salt Lake Book Festival is a free, all-ages event taking place on October 17. With twenty-five attending authors and twice as many vendors, the Gateway in downtown Salt Lake will be taking the shape of a block party from 10 am to sundown, featuring author conversations, panels, signings, and a curated market for all things bookish and analog. A quick peek at the festival schedule of paid breakout events — which highlight various authors, including the likes of Jodi goddamn Picoult(!) — will prove that this year’s festival is more than delivering on its promise to show our city a good time. Now it’s just up to us to swing by and show these artists, authors and artisans some love!

Read more about bookish goings-on in SLC:
Bookish and Proud: A Love Letter to Salt Lake and Literature
Rewriting the Rules of Feminine Rage: Bree Despain’s The Killing Rules

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