Concord, Massachusetts
Two weeks of talks, readings, and discussions celebrating the written and the spoken word.
Thomas Frank
Eric Foner
Lois Lowry
Junot Diaz
How You Can Participate
- Attend: Most events are free. All events are open to the public. Events that require a ticket are so indicated and include information about how and where to obtain tickets.
- Donate: The festival is produced by a non-profit foundation and depends greatly on individual support. Tax deductible donations in any amount are encouraged and can be made online.
- Sponsor: Corporate sponsorship is welcomed and is available. For information please .
Concord Festival of Authors is funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council,
a stage agency
Major Sponsors:
Justin Torres
Events: New Literary Voices 2012
Book: We the Animals
Justin Torres grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a recipient of the Rolon United States Artist Fellowship in Literature and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher and a bookseller.
Torres’s first novel, We the Animals, has been described as an exquisite, blistering debut. Three brothers tear their way through childhood — smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn — he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white — and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. It is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.