Detroit Bookfest: Sunday July 17

The Detroit Bookfest is Michigan’s largest (and Free!) book festival with used and rare dealers from the USA, Canada, and other countries attending. Come and peruse dozens of used and rare book dealers at the fifth annual Detroit Bookfest on Sunday, July 17, from 10 AM until 4 PM at Eastern Market Shed #5. Food trucks and beer too! This event is FREE and open to the public! For more information and maps visit: Detroit Bookfest. The Detroit Festival of Books is produced by the Book Club of Detroit.

Book Beat will be displaying sale books, first editions, and rare books in the fields of art, photography and illustrated children’s books. We are located at table #4 in Shed #5. We’ll be hosting several local authors this year. Stop by, chat with authors and pick up an inscribed book. Attending authors include:

•Rochelle Riley  is the author of That They Lived: African Americans Who Changed The World (Wayne State University Press, 2021) and The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery (WSUP, 2018). For nearly twenty years, Riley was a columnist at the Detroit Free Press. She is currently the Director of Arts and Culture for the City of Detroit. Booth Time: 1-3 PM

•Aaron Foley is the author of newly released Boy’s Come First (Belt Publishing, 2022) and two guides about Detroit: How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, and The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook. Foley is the founding director of the Black Media Initiative at the Center for Community Media at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Previously, he was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, chief storyteller for the City of Detroit, and editor of BLAC Detroit Magazine. Booth Time: 2-4 PM.

•Kelsey Ronan grew up in Flint, Michigan. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She lives in Detroit and teaches for InsideOut Literary Arts. Chevy in the Hole is her first novel and was praised in the New York Times. Ronan shared details about growing up in Flint, her favorite books, and the background story of Chevy in the Hole in a Book Beat newsletter. Booth time 12-2 PM.

•Donald Levin is the author of the recently published Savage City, “It’s set in 1932 during the height of the Depression and one of the few black cops on the Detroit force is trying to solve an apparent lynching of a young black man. But, the story unfolds along with the labor organizing of the period including the Ford Hunger March Massacre, the Purple Gang, the Black Legion, Fr. Coughlin, Henry Ford, all played out among familiar streets with acute attention to city history. Highly recommended.” -Peter Werbe. Booth Time: 1 PM -3 PM.

•Harvey Ovshinsky  author of Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling, (WSUP, 2021) has cancelled his appearance. 

•Peter Werbe is a long-time figure in alternative and commercial media in Detroit, and a political activist.. He is a member of the editorial board of the Fifth Estate magazine. His professional career was as a DJ on Detroit’s major rock stations, WABX, WWWW. WRIF, and WCSX. He hosted Nightcall, WRIF’s phone-in talk show, that was the longest running such program in U.S. radio history, 1970-2016.He is the author of Summer On Fire: A Detroit Novel (Red and Black, 2021). Booth Time: 12 -1 PM

• Alan Franklin has been a fixture in Detroit’s Cass Corridor arts, music and politics scene, and as a guitarist, Franklin has been best known as a songwriter/singer with that city’s anarcho ska-punk band, the Layabouts. During that same time, his prose writings have appeared in riverrun magazine, the Fifth Estate, the Daily Barbarian, Subversions (Montreal), Dispatch Detroit, ThreeFold and Autonomedia. His collection of his prose-poems was recently published as Lives of the Saints (Red and Black, 2022). Booth Time 12- 1pm.

“The Detroit Festival of Books is the groundbreaking used & rare books festival in the City of Detroit. The Detroit Festival of Books (aka the Detroit Bookfest) is a goodwill effort to help generate a deeper love and appreciation of books in the Greater Detroit community. This event is mostly indoors and partially outdoors and will be held rain or shine.” -Bookfest website