Arts

South End scribes come together in Book Festival

by Michele D.  Maniscalco
Thursday Oct 27, 2016

Whether you are in the mood to celebrate the Election Day outcome or to retreat from realit, the second annual South End Authors' Book Festival, which will convene on Wednesday, November 9 from 4:00 PM-7:30 PM at the Harriet Tubman House, 566 Columbus Avenue, will offer thought-provoking reading material to match any mood and lively conversation with authors and fellow book lovers. While the South End is best known as a nexus of visual-art creativity, our community has long been home to literary lights including the poet Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, and best-selling evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and likewise, the current crop of South End writers boasts a diversity of talent in a wide variety of genres. This year's book festival will welcome over 20 authors of poetry, fiction, social history, children's and young-adult literature and more.

Co-founders and organizers of the Festival include legendary community activist, former mayoral candidate and visionary Mel King, whose book, Chain of Change, was recently reissued; Northeastern University assistant professor Russell Lopez, author of Boston's South End: The Clash of Ideas in a Historic Neighborhood and Alison Barnet, founding editor of the South End News and author of South End Character, a collection of her South End News columns musing on 50 years of South End life and Sitting Ducks, a whodunit based on actual events that transpired in her early-1970s residence. West Canton Street resident Jean Gibran, author of Love Made Visible, a memoir of her fifty-year marriage to the artist and of a recent update of 2002's Kahlil Gibran: Beyond Borders, will appear to discuss her life and works, as will Lynne Potts, who authored A Block in Time: History of Boston's South End Through a Window on Holyoke, a 200-year account of the South End and the poetry collections, Porthole View and Mame, Sol and Dog Bark. Bonita McIlvaine, whose coming of age tale, 5 Squares, is in development as a film, will return to the festival to share her reminiscences as the daughter Johnny McIlvaine, owner of the Trinidad Lounge, Basin Street South and Roxbury's The Station. Johnny McIlvaine counted among his friends and associates major league baseball players, movie stars, politicians, policemen and pimps, and Bonnie McIlvaine's 5 Squares recalls her father's colorful circle as part of the fabric of her youth among a group of girls who frequented Boston's nightclubs and lounges in the 1960s and 1970s. Festival participant Jim Flanagan is the author of the novel, Comfort Zone, a "coming of age, coming out love story" about an American living in Denmark in 1989.

The organizing committee welcomes additional authors and volunteers to participate in the festival. Authors should be South End residents or should have written about the South End. Authors and volunteers who are interested in participating may contact Russell Lopez at rptlopez@gmail.com. Admission to the South End Authors' Book Festival is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served.