Books, More Books, and a Twin Cities Book Festival!

This year's Twin Cities Book Festival was once again held at MCTC and the place was packed from when the doors opened at 10 am to when they closed at 5 pm. And just like previous years, this book fest did not disappoint. It was certainly the place to be in a weekend packed with other great literary events such as the launch party for Paper Darts' first book, John Jodzio's Get In If You Want To Live, Milkweed Editions' Book Lovers Ball, and FallCon 2011 with the Midwest Comic Book Association.
The Twin Cities Book Festival, like usual, offered something for everyone. Most of my day was spent upstairs in the wonderfully creative Children's Pavilion with author Penny Noyce. We set up a Lexicon Villages Event and had a blast with the kids. It was great watching them get into the activities whether they were feeding Emily the thesaurus/llama synonyms, creating flower sentences out of word petals, making tangrams of Lost in Lexicon images, and measuring EVERYTHING they could get their hands on with our non-standard measuring units of erasers, paperclips, and pennies.

Meanwhile, downstairs, we had a table set up and we loved chatting away and finding out what everyone had been up to. The book fest has so many great qualities, but my favorite is probably the relaxed atmosphere—it's a great time to catch up with everyone in the literary community. I even ran into some friends of mine interning with Graywolf Press and we got to talk about the glorious lifesyle of an intern : ) At one o'clock it was time for me and Penny to pack up our Lexicon Villages Event, hop in the car, and bring it to the Roseville Barnes and Noble. There we had a book signing and Penny talked to educators about the importance of teaching through literature. We also had a lively discussion about how to engage children with books. It was a great visit, but by the end of the day we were exhausted. That said, we're looking forward to doing it all again next year and we hope we'll see you there too!
To learn more about Penny and her books, check out the website. If you're interested in having an author event, please visit the Scarletta Press site to contact us!