The Detroit Bookfest is Michigan’s largest (and Free!) book festival with used and rare dealers, bookmakers, and publishers, 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 16, from 10:00 AM-4:00 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.
Book Beat will be displaying sale books, first editions, book ephemera and rare books in the fields of art, photography, African-American studies and illustrated children’s books. We are located at table #4 in Shed #5. We’ll again be hosting a table featuring local authors with new books this year. Stop by, chat with authors and pick up an inscribed book. Attending authors at the Book Beat booth include:
Donald Levin is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. He is the author of the Michigan-based historical novels Savage City and his new book The Arsenal of Deceit, seven Martin Preuss mysteries set in and around metropolitan Detroit, as well as short fiction and poems that have appeared in numerous print and e-journals. Now writing full-time, he is retired dean of the faculty and Professor of English at the former Marygrove College in Detroit. He lives in Ferndale, Michigan, the setting for the Martin Preuss novels. Arsenal of Deceit is an eye-opening look at 1940s Detroit and a timely work that challenges our perceptions of power, trust and relationships. A great companion volume to Levin’s 1930s noir Detroit exposè, Savage City.
Booth time: 1:00-2:00 PM.
Andrew Collard received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, and currently teaches as a Visiting Professor at Grand Valley State University. Over the years, he has served as a poetry editor for Witness and Third Coast Magazine, and as an associate editor for New Issues Press. His first book, Sprawl, was published in March 2023 by Ohio University Press.
“Sprawl is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is Andrew Collard’s attempt to reconcile the tenderness and sense of purpose found in the parent-child relationship with ongoing societal crises in the empire of the automobile.”
-Publisher website
Booth time: 1:00-2:00 PM.
A brand new collection of poems by longtime Detroit poet and founder of the historical and legendary The Detroit Artists Workshop.
“The premise of this volume is that these poems were recorded in collaboration with the physiology, the psychological space, the physical environment, and the spiritual ambience of the moment. These are the forces with which I interact in the improvisations that create the tunes. First one voice and then another. Each contributing to the flow as the form is discovered and brought to the surface.
The concept of this poetry collection is that of a vinyl record in the Blue Note tradition where the tracks are labeled and the needle can be dropped on the tune desired—a single listen from beginning to end, a side-one to side-two parsing over a period of measured absorption, or a sampling based on curiosity, intrigue, or a sense of adventure.” ~Robin Eichele
Robin Eichele has written poetry and fiction for over half a century.A co-founder of the Detroit Artists’ Workshop Society and Press, Eichele’s work has graced countless publications, radio programs, poetry conferences, arts festivals, bookstores and cafes over the years.
Booth Time: 1:00-2:00 PM
Jack Cheng is a Shanghai-born, Detroit-based author of critically acclaimed fiction for young readers. His books include the children’s novel, See You in the Cosmos, which won the Golden Kite and Great Lakes, Great Reads awards for Best Middle Grade Fiction, and his new release The Many Masks of Andy Zhou.
“There’s an aching poignancy [here]. This moving novel about self-discovery will resonate with kids navigating the shifting waters of middle school.” —BCCB
“This thoughtful novel beautifully and naturally depicts Chinese American family life and the first year of middle school . . . This novel explores necessary topics and productively packages them in a great story about friendship, forgiveness, and family.” —Common Sense Media
“Cheng’s comedic timing and poignant use of metaphor make it easy to picture Andy’s anxiety and self-consciousness, [and] rich descriptions abound of Andy’s Chinese and Jameel’s Chaldean cultures . . . A beautiful, contemplative novel that will stay with readers. Recommended for fans of Erin Entrada Kelly and Nicole Melleby.” —School Library Journal
Jack Cheng has visited schools across the globe speaking with students about finding their paths as writers and artists. He is a 2019 Kresge Artist Fellow.
Booth time: 2:00-3:00 PM.
Marcus Collins is an award-winning marketer and cultural translator with one foot in the world of practice—serving as the Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York—and one foot in the world of academia—as a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Prior to his advertising tenure, Marcus began his career in music and tech with a startup he co-founded before working on iTunes + Nike sport music initiatives at Apple and running digital strategy for Beyoncé. His new book is For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be.
“Collins has been involved in some of the most successful advertising campaigns of the past two decades (he has worked with Beyoncé, Apple, Google, the Brooklyn Nets, and others), and he also has solid academic credentials, holding a key position at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. This experience in both spheres informs this book, as the author examines why certain campaigns have been astonishingly successful while others have fallen painfully flat. The key, he argues, is not about a product itself; it’s about connecting to a particular segment of society through shared values and experiences…. With personal stories and a dry wit, Collins bridges the gap between cultural theory and marketing practice.” –Kirkus
Booth time: 2:00-3:00 PM.
Bruce Harkness holds an MFA from Wayne State University and is the former city photographer of Dearborn, Michigan. His photographs have been published in Detroit Images: Photographs of the Renaissance City, Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream, and Before Fair Lane: Historic Houses from Henry Ford’s Hometown, Dearborn, Michigan (1832–1916), as well as in the Detroit Free Press. Historians, filmmakers, and urban planners often use Harkness’s photographs as valuable reference material. His latest book is Photographs from Detroit, 1975-2019.
“Over a lifetime of circumambulating Detroit’s environs, photographer Bruce Harkness has observed the often-neglected people and places of the city to expose, as it were, the essence of its otherwise marginalized physical, social, and emotional spaces. In these much-vaunted times of Detroit as a ‘Comeback City,’ the photography of Bruce Harkness calls upon us to pause and take note of what too often gets left behind in the march of ‘progress.’”
~Vince Carducci, dean emeritus, College for Creative Studies
Booth time: 3:00-4:00 PM.
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.
Eat the Rich and Other Interesting Ideas is Werbe’s latest book and is a selection of essays from the pages of the Fifth Estate. Eat the Rich explores some of the basic themes the publication addresses: anarchism, capitalism, technology, civilization, racism, patriarchy, politics, culture, music, the environment, his trips to Cuba, and other subjects that are explored in a manner that provide unique insights. The book will launch at the Detroit Festival of Books.
Booth time: 3:00-4:00 PM.
Andrew William Smith (Andy Sunfrog) is an educator, poet and host of Teacher On The Radio. His new book of poems is Broken Megaphones: Christ-Haunted Poems About Loving & Losing Religion. “The poems in this collection are all recent dispatches from a religious deconstruction that turned into revival. These deeply theological poems are the howling prayers of an anarchist-pacifist antiracist queer-affirming Christian fighting against the creeping Christocratic nationalism of my region, the stolen Cherokee land of Tenasi. These rants and chants chart my journey through religious deconstruction into the defiant redemption of the Christ who haunts the Bible Belt with an underground solidarity and witness of grief, hope, and human liberation.” -Andy Sunfrog
“I don’t know many poets and mystics, but Andrew William Smith is the genuine article. His poetry exudes passion, and his vulnerability on these pages is nothing short of stunning. . . . . Broken Megaphones is witness and testimony, fire and love. It is a gift. Take. Read. Receive.”
-Rick Quinn, writer at PopMatters and Ordinary Space.
Booth time: 3:00-4:00 PM.
“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