How’d you grow the festival into such a New York City institution?
People say you can’t plan by committee, but the BKBF always has! We partner with other literary organizations, like the Whiting Foundation, but we also have our own council of publishers, agents, and editors that helps us put the festival together every year. Brooklyn is home to everyone from everywhere, and the council allows us to have a diversity of input on what the festival should be. Each year, there’s anywhere from 20 to 25 people who are part of that. We really want to bring those people back together and celebrate them.
How else did you celebrate this year?
One of the things we’ve done is solicit people’s memories of the last 20 years of the festival, because it’s a very meaningful day for a lot of people. We know one author who had her first date at the festival, and she married that person. We have authors who were coming to the festival every year before they were even authors, and now they’re on our stages.
What memory would you share?
The children’s book illustrator Elisha Cooper has come to the Children’s Day a number of times. He sets up at a table, gets out his watercolors, plays some music, and, with no talking, sits there and models what it is to create art. You see the kids gravitate to him and mirror that aspect of him. They sit down, and they all make their artwork there, very quietly.
