Help Bring the Newburyport Literary Festival Back to Downtown Newburyport

NEWBURYPORT, Mass. – The Newburyport Literary Festival (NLF) needs your help. Current plans are for the beloved Festival to return to downtown Newburyport as a live, in-person event. However, organizers are discovering that transitioning from an online to in-person festival will be costly. Prices for lodging, transportation and venue rentals have skyrocketed. Funders the Festival has counted on in the past for significant contributions are bombarded by other equally as valued groups for financial help. As a result, the 2023 Festival is in jeopardy, unless funds can be raised quickly.
Festival organizers are turning to the community for help. In addition to reaching out to the local businesses and institutions who have been generous supporters in the past, a GoFundMe page has been set up to assist in fundraising efforts: https://gofundme.com/f/invest-in-the-fest.
Ideally, the Festival will come back to Newburyport in its original format. This includes the Opening Ceremony on Friday evening, April 28, a full day of in-person events to take place in various venues around downtown Newburyport on Saturday, April 29, and a day of presentations presented virtually via Facebook Live on Sunday, April 30. Participating authors and poets include honoree Peter Orner (“Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin”) in conversation with author and festival favorite Andre Dubus III; novelists Rebecca Makkai (“I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel”), Allegra Goodman (“Sam”) and Kamila Shamsie (“Best of Friends”); physicist Alan Lightman, (“The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science”); editor Midge Goldberg leading a panel poets who contributed to “Outer Space: 100 Poems”; and historian Greg Melville (“Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries”).
Organizers stress that these plans can only become reality with the help of the public. If you have attended the Festival in the past or have a love of books and reading and would like to attend this year, please consider helping bring the Festival back to Newburyport. To support this year’s Festival, please visit https://gofundme.com/f/invest-in-the-fest.
The NLF is made possible through the generosity of our founding sponsors, the Newburyport Bank and the Institution for Savings. Additional support is provided by the Massachusetts Local Cultural Councils in Newburyport, Newbury, West Newbury, Georgetown and Merrimac.
The Newburyport Literary Festival (NLF), organized by the Newburyport Literary Association, annually celebrates reading and the love of books. For more information about the 2023 NLF, including authors and their work, please visit http://newburyportliteraryfestival.org