New Look, New Logo Mark Festival’s 10th Year

In 1999, George Mason University and the City of Fairfax inaugurated a small literary event — a series of readings and discussions that kicked off Thursday night, Sept. 23, with celebrated poet Forrest Gander in the basement of the campus bookstore and continued at a handful of downtown venues through the weekend, ending Saturday night with novelist Elizabeth Berg.

From those humble beginnings, Fall for the Book, Northern Virginia’s oldest celebration of the literary arts, also grew to become its largest. Each fall, attendance surpasses that of the previous festival— topping 10,000 each of the last two years. Each fall, events are hosted in even more venues, spread more widely throughout Northern Virginia. Each fall, people of all ages flock to an even more diverse and dramatic schedule of writers, scholars, and performers from across the country and around the world. Dave Eggers, Nikki Giovanni, Pat Conroy, Khaled Hosseini, Cornell West, Mitch Albom, Tobias Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Kearns Goodwin — over the years, audiences have laughed with, learned from, and been moved by these and hundreds of other outstanding authors, the “rock stars of writing.”

As Fall for the Book prepares for its 10th year, several changes are afoot: a new logo, for example, and a new look evidenced on the pages you’re reading now.

But in the midst of these transitions, one thing remains the same: Our commitment to bringing to you the finest writers on earth. The 2008 festival already boasts novelists Chinua Achebe, Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter, and Sue Miller; poets Jennifer Atkinson, Kyle Dargan, Eric Pankey, and C.K. Williams; and some of the leading names in creative nonfiction, beginning with journalist and memoirist Scott Huler. And there’s much more in store, So mark your calendars now for Fall for the Book, Volume 10 — our biggest and boldest edition ever.