At 30, the Festival of Reading turns a page

The Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading has 30 candles on the cake in 2022, and for books editor Colette Bancroft, that says something special about the city.

“I think it shows that St. Petersburg has, for a very long time, been a supporter of literacy, of reading, of authors,” says Bancroft, who’s been in charge of the reading, chatting and signing event since 2007. “The audience has been steady over three decades. And that’s pretty amazing.

“We’ve always had the community supporting it, every year. I start getting emails from snowbirds in the spring, saying ‘What’s the date?’”

The date is Nov. 12, this Saturday, and after two seasons as an impersonal, virtual event (thank you, Covid-19), for Year 30 it’s live once more.

By 2021, Bancroft says, “everybody was tired of virtual everything.” Tough to get books autographed that way.

Still, “I was pleased in a lot of ways with how the virtual ones tuned out. With some of the authors, it was just easier to get them on a Zoom call than to get them to St. Petersburg. But I’m very glad to have it back in person.”

Bibliophiles will notice the Festival of Reading has a new look this year. With the exception of Colette Bancroft and the members of her hardworking team, it has a new everything.

It’s in a new venue, the 800-seat Palladium Theater. Those festivals on the sprawling campus of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg are distant memories now. The author talks, and audience Q&A sessions, will take place upstairs in Hough Hall. Tombolo Books is handling book sales, downstairs in the Side Door Café, which is also where authors will be stationed for signing.

There is, of course, potential for some confusion. “I hope that we don’t have people showing up Saturday at USF St. Pete,” Bancroft laughs.

Streamlining was necessary, she explains. “That big festival that we put on for many years took a lot of people, working a lot of hours. And it also took a lot of money. It never made money for the Times, it cost money for the Times.

“Our staff is smaller, and our disposable income is smaller, so we just had to figure out a way to still do it. Do a streamlined version of the event and still give people the experience of meeting authors and hearing them talk about their books.”

There are 15 authors in the ’22 lineup. In previous years, there’d be as many as 45, and Bancroft made sure she read and published reviews of all their latest works.

“I would wear myself out for three or four months out of the year,” she marvels. “It’s still a lot of work for me, and has kept me busy the last couple of months, but not nearly as much work as it was in the past.”

Another major change: Admission to the Festival of Reading is no longer free.

“Obviously it will keep some people away; I’ve gotten emails from some of them!” says Bancroft. “At USF, we would have six or seven venues, with somebody speaking in each one all day long. And several thousand people would show up. If the room was full, they could move on to something else, or wait for the next one.

“This is a single room that holds a limited number of people. And if 2,000 people showed up, we’d have to turn more than half of them away. The ticketing allows us to know how many people to expect.”

The event is a fundraiser for the Tampa Bay Times Journalism Fund.

The authors include longtime New York Times, PBS and CNN journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault (My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives) who in 1961 became one of the first two Black students to integrate the University of Georgia; Pulitzer Prize winner Jack E. Davis (The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird); novelist Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone) and Emmy-winning journalist Beth Macy (Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis).

See the full list of authors, with biographies, here.

Bancroft is particularly pleased to welcome Lehane, a former St. Pete resident and an alumnus of Eckerd College.

“He is such an impressive, incredible writer,” she says. “He hasn’t written a book in five years. But he hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs, he’s been incredibly busy doing television and movie work.”

She received an advance copy of Lehane’s upcoming thriller, Small Mercies, which won’t be out until the spring.

“I’ve loved every one of his books, but this book is kind of another step forward in his career as a novelist. Plus, he’s just an interesting guy. I’m excited that I get to talk to him onstage, because he’s a lot of fun.”

All ticket information and event details here.