In the beginning of June, the annual Bay Area Book Festival kicked off in the heart of downtown Berkeley with all the literary awesomeness that any book lover will love. Tents, stages, art installations, food, and book lovers filled the closed-off streets.
Everywhere you turned, you see people standing in lines for panels, carrying books picked from the Lacuna installation-library, chatting with the staff and volunteers who made this festival possible at the tents, browsing the farmer’s market that happens every Saturday. Everybody that attended was here for the books.
Saturday was my only free day, so I stopped by the Festival, hoping to make up for my lack of panel attendance last year and meet some awesome authors that I adore. I only managed to attend two panels: 1. “Crossing a Bridge: Moving Between Tween and Teen and Back Again” with Tim Federle, Lauren Myracle, and Jason Reynolds; and 2. “A Sense of Place: Writing Where We Live (and Lived)” with Stephanie Kuehn, Stacey Lee, Elizabeth Percer, and Yvonne Prinz.