Lineup revealed for second Wordplay festival in Minneapolis
The lineup has been revealed for the second annual Wordplay festival to be held in Minneapolis this spring.
The literary festival debuted last year with the likes of Stephen King among those making appearances.
The Loft, which is producing the event, has announced the lineup for the 2020 Wordplay, which includes a range of national and local writers.
Among those announced for this year is Alison Roman, a food columnist for the New York Times and Bon Appetit, who became a best-selling author for her 2017 book, Dining In.
She is joined by TV star and standup Michael Ian Black (My Wet Hot American Summer) who has written numerous children's and adult books over the past decade.
Also announced is Charles Yu, best known for his novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Scott Pelley, the long-running CBS News anchor and journalist who left the network last year.
Local authors booked for the event include Minneapolis writer Kate DiCamillo, the children's fantasy writer whose novels include The Tale of Despereaux, the St. Paul poet and author Danez Smith, whose Don't Call Us Dead was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2017, and Kao Kalia Yang, the Hmong-American writer who wrote Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.
And there will also be an appearance from Minnesota's own Olympic gold medal winner Jessie Diggins, who will be promoting her new book Brave Enough.
Those who attend Wordplay will be able to hear from and interact with the authors at various workshops, readings and special experiences.
The event will kick off with a "carnival-themed" fundraiser called Open Book on Friday, May 8.
The festival itself will be held on Saturday, May 9 in the Minneapolis Mill City neighborhood.
Here's the full list of writers booked for the event and the works they're promoting:
Children’s
John Coy and Wing Young Huie – Dads
Christopher Eliopoulos – The Yawns Are Coming!
Heather Fox and Jonathan Stutzman – Llama Unleashes the Alpacalypse
Tracy Nelson Maurer – Samuel Morse, That’s Who!: The Story of the Telegraph and Morse Code
Cheryl Minnema – Johnny’s Pheasant
Middle Grade
Sylvia Acevedo – Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist
Tom Angleberger – The Sewer Rat Stink
Max Brallier – Shadow in the Woods and Other Scary Stories
Kacen Callender – King and The Dragonflies
Sayantani DasGupta – The Chaos Curse
Kate DiCamillo – Beverly, Right Here
Debbi Michiko Florence – Keep It Together, Keiko Carter
Omar Mohamed – When Stars Are Scattered
Linda Sue Park – Prairie Lotus
Jacqueline West – The Collectors, A Storm of Wishes (sequel to “The Collectors”)
Young Adult
Tonya Bolden – Changing the Equation: 50+ US Black Women in STEM; Saving Savannah
Patrice Caldwell – A Phoenix Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope
Melissa de la Cruz – The Queen’s Assassin
Minh Lê – Green Lantern: Legacy
Junauda Petrus – The Stars and the Blackness Between Them
Randy Ribay – Patron Saints of Nothing
Len Vlahos – Hard Wired
Kiersten White – The Guinevere Deception
Deborah Wiles – Anthem
Ashley Woodfolk – When You Were Everything
Gene Luen Yang – Dragon Hoops
Cookbook
Alison Roman – Nothing Fancy
Fiction
Tola Rotimi Abraham – Black Sunday
Quan Barry – We Ride Upon Sticks
Andrea Bartz – The Herd
Clare Beams – The Illness Lesson
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan – Starling Days
Gabriel Bump – Everywhere You Don’t Belong
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight – Hex
Kristin Eiríksdóttir and Larissa Kyzer – A Fist or a Heart
Allen Eskens – Nothing More Dangerous
Charles Finch – The Last Passenger
Peter Geye – Northernmost
Matt Goldman – Dead West
Emily Gould – Perfect Tunes
Lily King – Writers & Lovers
Hilary Leichter – Temporary
Raymond Luczak – Flannelwood
Sara Mesa and Katie Whittemore – Four by Four
Poupeh Missaghi – trans(re)lating house one
Tracy O’Neill – Quotients
Thomas D. Peacock – The Wolf’s Trail: An Ojibwa Story, Told by Wolves
Benjamin Percy – Suicide Woods
John Scalzi – The Last Emperox
Amber Sparks – And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges
Dennis E. Staples – This Town Sleeps
Emma Straub – All Adults Here
Brandon Taylor – Real Life
Deb Olin Unferth – Barn 8
Laura van den Berg – I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
Jeff VanderMeer – Dead Astronauts
Kawai Strong Washburn – Sharks in the Time of Saviors
Teddy Wayne – Apartment
Rita Woods – Remembrance
Charles Yu – Interior Chinatown
C Pam Zhang – How Much of These Hills is Gold
Nonfiction
Michael Ian Black – A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son
Alexis Coe – You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
Claire Comstock-Gay – Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves
Stephanie Danler – Stray
Jessie Diggins – Brave Enough
Cyrus Grace Dunham – A Year Without A Name
Jack El-Hai – The Lost Brothers: A Family’s Decades-Long Search
Nick Flynn – Stay: threads, conversations, collaborations
John Freeman – Dictionary of the Undoing
Mara Hvistendahl – The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage
Steve Inskeep – Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War
Samatha Irby – Wow, No Thank You.
Karine Jean-Pierre – Moving Forward: A Story of Hope, Hard Work, and the Promise of America
Erin Khar – Strung Out: One Last High and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn – Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
Laila Lalami – Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
Edan Lepucki – Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them
Scott Pelley – Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter’s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times
Casey Schwartz – Attention: A Love Story
Jennifer Steinhauer – The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress
Jan Stocklassa – The Man Who Played With Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin
Kao Kalia Yang – Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir
Poetry
Rick Barot – The Galleons
Natalie Diaz – Postcolonial Love Poem
Mark Doty – What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Roy G. Guzmán – Catrachos
Major Jackson – The Absurd Man
Ilya Kaminsky – Deaf Republic
Paige Lewis – Space Struck
Lara Mimosa Montes – Thresholes
Jake Skeets – Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Danez Smith – Homie
Jenny Zhang – My Baby First Birthday
